Google Adsense Tour - introducing you to the Adsense program.
Getting Started Demo: learn to sign in, copying and pasting your code, setting up alternate ads, and using your Competitive Ad Filter.
Help with Ad Code Demo: troubleshoot basic problems when implementing your code. Also covers how to implement your code using two different types of WYSIWYG software.
Payment Demo: learn about the AdSense payment cycle, from a click on your ads to money in the bank!
Optimization Demo: learn how to use ad size and placement to maximize your AdSense revenue.
Track Adsense Income, Statistics and Clicks
Adsense Notifier - Firefox extension that displays your Adsense earnings on the Firefox statusbar.
SysSense - personal desktop Google AdSense monitor. It keeps your current Google AdSense information in the Windows system tray.
Adsense Widget - a Mac Dashboard widget that automatically logs into your AdSense Google account and displays the last 6-days of revenue generated from your Google advertising account.
Google Adsense Yahoo Widget - displays the current income directly from your Google AdSense account.
Stats for AdSense widget - allows you to view your Google AdSense™ reports directly from your Mac OS X Dashboard.
Adsense Status - GoogleDesktop plugin to View earnings information from your Google Adsense account in the Google Desktop sidebar. Available information: page impressions, clicks, page CTR, page eCPM, and your earnings.
Adsense Alert - desktop client monitors your adsense earnings.
Performancing Metrics - a free professional grade blog statistics service that track limited adsense click data
Adsense earnings RSS feed - a simple script that will create an RSS feed with your daily Adsense earnings to track via your regular feed reader.
Google AdSense Charts and Graphs - chart your adsense data in a multidimensional line charts.
AdSenseLog is a tool for checking and analyzing your Adsense ads data (Content, Search, Custom/URL channels and Referrals).
View / Test Adsense Ads
Google AdSense preview tool - addition to the right-click menu for Windows Internet Explorer 6.x, allowing you to preview the ads that may show on any web page.
Adsense Preview - Preview the Google ads that may show on any web page.
Google AdSense Sandbox Tool - see what sort of Google AdSense ads will appear based on content or keywords. See up to 20 sample AdSense ads for the URL or keywords.
Overture Keyword Tool - suggest keyword bid amount and keyword suggestions, which help you target high paying keywords.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool - generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends.

If you're wondering about something, don't be afraid to ask Google. So far, they've always responded to my questions within a working day. There are two email addresses to use, depending on the type of question:
Please feel free to email us at adsense-tech@google.com if you have additional technical questions or concerns. For general program or account questions, please email adsense-support@google.com.
Their responses are always very polite, and they appreciate getting problem reports and suggestions.

We have unpacked our Adsense Equation in detail and have given numerous tips for maximising Adsense Revenue. Whilst there are occasions that Adsense doesn’t perform as well on some websites for no particular reason as others we can safely predict that if you work on each of the four areas you should see an increase in the amount of the cheque that Adsense sends you at the end of each month. Remember though that your revenue will only be as high as your weakest link - work on all elements of the equation - not just one or two.
As well as the proceeding tips there are a number of other things that might be helpful to know in using Adsense that we couldn’t find a place for in previous posts.
Outgoing Links - One theory going around is that pages with fewer outgoing links result in higher click-throughs. Give your readers fewer options of links to click on and they are more likely to click on your ads. This MAY be true, but don’t let it determine your content. My Digicam site has many outward links because it is a page that acts as a hub of information from around the web. I’ve not noticed that this makes my revenue levels suffer - in fact I suspect its because of these helpful links that people come to my site.
Using Frames - If your site uses frames I’m told you should make sure your ads are placed in the frame where you content is or else it will not provide relevant ads for your content. Thanks Greg for this tip.
Don’t click your own ads. - It might be an obvious way to get a few click throughs and increase your Adsense revenue - but Google is very clever at working out if your clicks are genuine or not. Its not hard to track IP addresses and to see patterns emerging between where clicks are coming from. It is not worth the risk of being banned from the program for a few cents per click. Especially don’t click ads from the same IP address that you check your stats from - this is asking for trouble.
Don’t encourage your readers to click on your ads. Its against the agreement that you enter into with Google. Once again they will track you down if you break these rules. I’ve seen a number of people who have been banned from Adsense for this. Let your ads speak for themselves.
Monitor your Statistics. Many adsense users check their stats all day everyday. Whilst this might be overkill (its like watching grass grow) it is useful to track what is happening at this end of your campaign. Use channels to monitor which pages are doing well and which are not. Tweak pages that are not doing well and make more pages similar to those that do.
Alternative Ads - Use alternative ads for when Adsense cannot serve ads to your page. When they cannot find a suitable ad for your page Adsense will serve you with a ‘Public Service Announcement’ (PSA). These ads may be for a good cause, but they will not relate to the content of your page and will not earn you any money. Instead Adsense allows you to nominated an alternative ad that they will serve into the position instead of the PSA. I use Amazon for this, but also have experimented with affiliate alternative ads Affiliate Sensor which I find works really well as it lets you choose from a wide range of affiliate products and still target them to your site.
That is the end of our Adsense tips for Bloggers series. Feel free to submit your own Adsense tips and strategies in comments below. You also might like to check out some of the following alternative Adsense Tips pages for more tips from around the web. You might also like to check out the the Chitika eMiniMall Ad system which I make most of my income off these days. I reviewed it here and have a series of tips for getting the most out of your eMiniMalls.

The forth element of our Adsense Equation is that of having well designed and optimally placed Adsense Ads. I’ve found that ad positioning is incredibly important. I remember shifting the ads on one of my blogs a while back and being over the moon to discover the next morning that the move had doubled the click through rates that I’d had over night! Its worth doing some tweaking.
Adsense Ad placement and design is an issue that is often hotly debated in Adsense discussion forums. It seems that each Adsense user has their own strategy - some like ads that blend in, others like ads that stand out from the rest of the page. Some like ads in banner positions, others in skyscrapers, others like to put them right in the middle of content. In my experience, different strategies work on different blogs at different times. The key tip I’ll give you is to experiment. Try new positions and design and track your results. One of the best ways you can do this is by using Adsense Tracker which is an amazing tracking package for adsense which gives you much more control over what and how you track your adsense performance. It does cost to purchase the tracker but in my experience you’ll make your money back pretty quickly by using it to adapt your Adsense strategies.
Let me also share a few other tips that you might like to experiment with.
Blend - Most successful Adsense users seem to be taking the approach of blending their ads into the overall theme of their page. This often means making the ad’s background (and often border) the same (or similar) colour to the background of the page and making the title and URL the same as links of the rest of the page. In this way the ad does not stand out as being ‘ad-like’. Having said this I know of a few bloggers who take the opposite approach and make their ads as bright and ugly as possible in the hope of attracting the attention of their readers. I don’t subscribe to this because I think it cheapens the overall feel and look of a page.
In Content - More and more bloggers (and webmasters) are putting their ads inside the main body of their posts. In this way the ads are prominent and more likely to be seen by readers as they read your content. If your text wraps around the ads this can be quite effective. On the flipside of this argument is that you may run the risk of frustrating your readers with dominant ads. People reading content online are a fickle bunch and get easily turned off by blatant advertising.
Above the Fold - it is generally accepted that your Adsense ads should be placed towards the top of your page and be visable without your reader having to scroll down. Studies show that blog visitors stay on average for only 60 or so seconds, many without scrolling down. If you ads are hidden towards the bottom of your page you decrease the likelihood of them ever being seen let alone clicked.
Left is Best - Google has put together a ‘heat map’ which is probably the best thing that you can look at when thinking about the positioning of your ads. You’ll see from it that they have found that ads on the left hand side of the page do much better than those on the right hand side.
Too Dominent? - The position and design of your Adsense ads needs to be balanced with the overall purposes and design of your blog. What is the priority of your blog - is it to make money or is it something else. I have a number of blogs - and place ads differently on each depending upon their purposes. For example this blog is not a commercial blog - I’m more interested in building relationships, sharing and hearing others ideas and updating those interested in what I’m doing with my life. As a result my Adsense Ads are in a less prominent banner position and are designed to fit with the overall theme of the blog. However on my Digital Photography Blog there is obviously a more commercial intent (as well as it being something of a passion and hobby). As a result I experiment with more prominent Adsense ads (usually skyscraper and within content).
I cannot stress enough how useful it is to experiment. What works on one blog doesn’t always work on another. I’ve also noticed that if you have a blog with regular and loyal readers that it is good to keep things changing as your readers tend to get used to the way your blog is and become blind to things like Adsense Ads. I notice that when I move my ads around that it often creates higher click throughs for a few days - until the blindness kicks in again. Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense is an excellent E-book written with lots of good tips on positioning your adsense ads if you’re wanting to get another person’s opinion on this topic.

The third element of our Adsense equation is that of relevant Adsense ads. It is all very well to rank high in search engines to generate high levels of traffic, but without relevant ads that relate to the content of your blog you are not likely to generate much in the way of click throughs.Let me give you an example. Recently I was asked to help a fellow blogger who has struggling with his Adsense ads because whilst his content largely focused upon the topic of ‘health care’ - most of the ads being served to his blog were focused upon ‘blogging’. He was getting quite reasonable traffic levels and had a reasonably high paying topic (there are some good health care ads out there) but as you’d expect, people coming to a blog about health care did not click on ads for blogging software and services at a very high rate. The challenge was to get his ads reflecting the content of his blog.
Another fellow blogger had the problem of not getting ANY ads being served to his site. Instead of paying ads all he was getting was the public service ads that Adsense serves when they couldn’t find any relevant paying ads (these pay nothing).
How do you get relevant ads? Here are a few things to try.
Make sure there are ads available - My friend who didn’t get any paying ads served was focusing on a key word for which there was no or very few ads. A simple way of checking this is to do a search on Google for the key word you are targeting. If they don’t serve ads on their own search results page its an indication that such ads are scarce - if not non existent. They way we got ads on my friends blog was to experiment with other related keywords. He didn’t have to change the focus of his blog - just the way he described his topics. For example if there are no ads for ‘bed linen’ try ‘blankets’, ’sheets’, ‘quilts’ etc. Experiment with different combinations until you find something that works.
Increase your Keyword density - The more you use your keywords the more likely you are to get ads on those topics. Its not common knowledge exactly how the Adsense bot decides what ads suit your content best (if someone knows feel free to post it in comments below) but it’s a pretty safe bet that if you put you keyword in your title, at least once in your first paragraph and then scatter it throughout the rest of your page that you’ll convince the Adsense bot of what your topic is. It MAY also be helpful to include your keywords in the URL of your page (Moveable type can let you do this - ie look at the URL of this page - it incorporates my title and therefore some keywords). It MAY also be worth putting your keywords in outward links, bold, italics etc. All of these strategies also help optimise yor blog for search engines which won’t hurt either.
Examine your Sidebars, menus, header and footer - It is not just your main content that the Adsense bot searches to find the topic of your page, but also your other areas. When I looked at the healthcare blog that was getting ‘blogging’ ads I noticed that he had the word ‘blog’ in his title, three times on his sidebar and once in his footer. It was also in his URL and he also used the word quite often in his content. My recommendation was to remove the word from as many of those places as possible and to increase his health care keywords. The ads improved their relevancy almost immediately.
Stick to one topic per page - Obviously this may not be feasible on your front page - but attempt to keep each individual blog entry/post as highly targeted as possible. I’ve noticed that some people often include two or three topics in one entry - this will confuse Adsense’s bot so split them up into two entries.
Block irrelevant Ads - Sometimes despite your best intentions Google just gets it wrong and serves your ads that have nothing to do with what you write. If you’re getting some repeating irrelevant ads block them. Adsense lets you do this to quite a few sites and its easy to do. I have a number of ads blocked, some because they are philosophically not consistent with what I write about, but mainly because they just are not relevant to the topic of my blogs.
Ask Adsense - If all else fails notify Google Adsense of your issue. Of course they are busy people - but Google prides itself on being responsive to its users. I’ve emailed with queries a number of times, once on an issue of irrelevant ads, and every time I’ve had positive results from my query. You’ve got nothing to loose - shoot them an email!
If you do all of the above you SHOULD find Adsense serves you with relevant ads. In conjunction with the other elements in our equation this will contribute to increased click throughs and hopefully higher Adsense revenue. Next in this series on maximizing Adsense revenue is a post on Well Placed and Designed Adsense Ads.

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads
The next element of this Adsense equation to be examined is how to get high paying Adsense Ads running on your site. Obviously in any business one way to get higher profits is to charge more for your product - whilst you have no direct say in how much is charged for ads run on your site - there are ways of targeting types of ads that might bring in a higher return than others.

As we mentioned in our initial explanation of the equation, the PVR Blog is one example of a blog that targets a well paying ad type - ads for PVR technology. Whilst I do not know specifics of earnings I would suspect blogs like Gizmodo who run Adsense ads would also be generating a higher paying ad, due to their focus on technology.
The lesson we can learn from blogs such as these is that they attract specific ads (that presumably are well paying) by keeping their content targeted on the same topics. To over simplify what we’re saying - if you want ads about Camera Phones blog about Camera Phones.
Finding High Paying Ads is not as easy as it sounds (is anything?). Do a search for Google on High Paying Adsense Ads and you won’t find too many sites listing the best keywords for Adsense. The top Adsense users in Adsense discussion forums tend to be pretty secretive about not only what keywords they focus on, but also what sites they run. I don’t blame them either - its good business sense really.
Having said this there are a number of strategies and tools that you might like to employ to help find high paying keywords.
Buy them - Finding high paying keywords for your blog is possible by yourself for free - but as with everything a few entrepreneurial types are willing to do the leg work for you to save you some time and give you a comprehensive result. One service that you might like to try to find good keywords is Top Paying Keywords.
Trial and Error - I know this will frustrate some of you who want a nice and easy quick fix but overall it is one of the best pieces of advice I can give. Try writing on a topic - track the results - if it pays off do it again….lots. Adsense allows you to track specific pages or sections of your blog using its ‘channels’ feature - if you’re smart you’ll watch which sections of your blog are generating the highest ads by dividing your overall earnings by the number of clicks and comparing it to other channels. Keep trying new topics until you strike gold and then dig in like crazy!
Are there Any Ads? - This is a good first question. Despite the many thousands of advertisers using Adsense there are some topics where the answer to this question is no. A simple way to check is to head to Google and do a search for the key words you’re wanting to blog about. The results page will bring up not only a list of other sites writing about that key word (they are you competitors) but on the right hand side there will be a list of ads - these are the same sorts of ads you’ll get on your site if you write on the topic. If there are ads there, it is a good sign. If there are not - maybe its worth finding another topic to write on if you’re hoping to attract ads.
7 Search has a list of the 100 of the top paying keywords (in their advertising program - not Adsense) at the moment. Its a bit depressing actually to see a list like this because you’d have to sell your soul somewhat in order to go with many of them. Its an interesting site to check out though.
Also from 7 Search (and more useful) is their Keyword Suggestion Tool which gives you an idea of what people are paying per click on different tools (again this is not specifically for Adsense but it will give you an idea of what the going rates are). Find What also has a similar service.
Google Adsense’s biggest competitor are Overture (they run the ads on Yahoo) - they offer a service where you can enter your keywords and they will not only tell you how much advertisers are paying for the words but also how many people are searching for the term. This is a very useful tool.
Sign up for Adwords - One way of getting a feel for how much people are willing to pay per click is to sign up with Google as an advertiser yourself. It doesn’t cost much to start a mini campaign and do some research this way. You’ll get a feel for what people are bidding on different words very quickly this way.
Word Tracker is the best tool I’ve seen to help in finding keywords that people are searching for in the major search engines. The excellent thing about Word Tracker is that they also tell you how many other sites out there are targeting the same words! This is very handy as it will stop you targeting ‘Britney Spears’ as a Keyword phrase even though its one of the most searched for keywords on the web because literally hundreds of thousands of other sites have beaten you to the punch. Word Tracker has a free version to trial it and their paying version is even better - well worth the investment.
Targeting High Paying Adsense Ads is an important aspect of generating an income from Adsense. It is not enough in and of itself however. You can have $10 per click ads (I’ve not found any of these yet) but without generating any traffic your research into the right ads will be useless. Likewise it is one thing to identify which ads you want to target - but it is another thing to actually get these relevant ads showing on your site. It is to this topic which our next post in this series will head - Finding Relevant Adsense Ads.

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

I now will turn my attention to each of the four elements of good Adsense revenue in turn and give some practical easy to implement tips to improve each from my experience.
Increasing Traffic Levels is a key component to increasing Adsense revenue. As I wrote previously, ‘The more people that see you Adsense Ads, the more likelihood there is that someone will click on them.’
Increasing the readership of your blog is not as simple as it sounds, it takes time, patience and hard work (and sometimes a bit of luck) Having said that there are many things you can do to get your blog in front of a wider audience and there exposing the adsense messages on your site to more potential ‘clickers’. Here are a few tips…
Quality, Interesting, Useful and Original Content - What are the blogs that you read the most? If you’re anything like me they are blogs that have quality content that ’scratches me where I itch’. This is essential to increasing your readership unless you have a pretty amazing ‘gimmick’ to bring readers in.

Good Blog Design is really important if you want your blog to create a good first impression. With millions of other blogs and sites out there its worth some effort to make yours stand out. Also worth a read is Good Weblog Design and Layout.

Link to others - be generous with your links to other bloggers big and small. You’ll be surprised how many links come back your way. This not only brings traffic from their sites but doesn’t hurt your ranking in Google.
Comment on others blogs - Some of my most loyal readers came to my blog because I genuinely interacted with them on their blogs through comments. Hear me now, I say genuinely because its easy to spam in comments, but this will have the opposite effect of generating readers to your blog.
Update Frequently - There is nothing that turns me off a blog faster than seeing that it hasn’t been updated for a month or more. Keep it rolling over with interesting content.
Interact with Readers - Having an interactive blog that invites the involvement of readers is one way of generating repeat visitors. I’ve written a tip on Interactive Blogging including a number of interactive tools that you can use on your blog. Also check out this tip on using comments effectively to increase interactivity on your blog.
Optimise for Search Engines - I can’t stress enough how important Search Engines are to increasing traffic, especially traffic that will click on your ads. I find that 95% of my traffic comes from Google and have found that anecdotal evidence suggests this traffic clicks through on Adsense ads at a higher rate than traffic from links on other blogs and sites. So work hard at getting listed and highly ranked on Search Engines.
Add a signature to your outgoing email - Learn a lesson from Hotmail who have used signatures on the bottom of their users emails for years to promote their home page and generate interest in their product. Be careful though if you don’t want your worlds to collide!
Web Rings - There are literally thousands of webrings that you can sign up for. I’m not sure how effective they are these days, but some people still swear by them.
Add an RSS feed to your blog - more and more people are reading blogs without ever visiting them through News Aggregators that pick up information using RSS. Whilst this does not guarantee those reading through aggregators will visit your blog (and therefore see your Adsense Ads) it certainly increases the chances of them dropping by, especially if you invite comments and have internal links on your posts.
List your site on Portals - There are a growing number of sites which exclusively list blogs. If you want people to find you its worth submitting your blog to be listed on them. Some focus on specific topics while others list blogs on a wide variety of topics (like Eaton Web and Globe of Blogs). Other portals like BlogShares and Blog Street also list a lot of blogs in different ways which might increase your blogs profile.
Blog Search Engines and Indexes - Get yourself registered on sites like Blogdex, Technorati, Popdex and Daypop (they require RSS I think). These sites have features that allow people to search for blog entries via topic and keywords. They also list the most popular recent topics and each have other interesting features which can enhance your blogging experience.
Start a Newsletter - Offer your readers a newsletter service to keep them up to date with your latest posts. I’ve found since adding a free weekly newsletter to my digicam blog that hundreds of readers have signed up for regular updates of my latest posts. Think about this - hundreds of people have given me permission to invite them to come back to my blog - every week!
Get Involved in Blog Projects and Memes - From time to time other bloggers will invite your participation in a blog project of theirs. Get involved, support their project and you might find it pays off. On the flip side start your own blogging project or meme. Do something that is of service to other bloggers. I tried something like this with Underblogs and Blogger Idol.
Get involved in other web forums - Genuinely participate in web forums and discussion pages on topics related to your blog. Many of these allow you to add a signature to your posts which raise your blogs profile.
Promote your Posts - If you think you’ve written something worthwhile spend a few minutes letting others know about it. I regularly shoot other bloggers to notify them of what I’ve written if I think it will interest them. Think about it before you send the email and don’t bombard the same people constantly with every topic you write on - be selective, concise, polite and helpful with your emails but don’t be afraid to promote yourself.
Add a ‘Email a Friend’ Option to your posts - make it easy for your readers to tell others about what you’ve written. I know this function gets used regularly on my blog and brings in new readers that I would never otherwise have been able to reach.
These are just some of the ideas that I’ve used and seen others use to increase the readership of a blog and thereby increase the exposure of Adsense ads to a wider audience.Many of the above tips were taken from my Blog Tips Series including the ‘Finding Readers’ Series.
What methods have your found to be effective at increasing the readership of your blog? What works for your and what doesn’t? What tips would you add to this collection?
Of course increasing traffic alone won’t greatly increase your Adsense revenue, but it can help! In our next Adsense Tip for Bloggers we will explore ways to generate High Paying Ads - the second component in our Adsense Revenue Equation.

There are many factors that impact the level of revenue generated from a blog using the Google Adsense program. Books have been written explaining expert strategies for Adsense - However for the purposes of this series we’ve boiled it all down into four elements that we believe impact your Adsense earning capacity the most. Speaking in general terms here is a simple equation that illustrates how the factors each contribute to Adsense Revenue.
Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads
Its not Rocket Science. Each of the above four elements contribute directly to the total revenue that your Adsense Ads will produce. Don’t just work on one of them though because if any one is weak it will hold your potential earnings back. Lets break each factor down….Traffic Levels - The more people that see you Adsense Ads, the more likelihood there is that someone will click on them. As I examine the statistics provided by Adsense that report my daily earnings I notice that my earnings in the past 8 months have increased considerably as my total page impressions have increased. For example earlier in the week when Slashdot linked up to this post I had an influx of 50,000 visitors in 24 hours to my blog - it doesn’t take a genius to work out what this did to my Adsense earnings that day! Work on increasing your traffic levels and you should see an increase in your Adsense Revenue.
High Paying Ads - Once again I’m stating the obvious, but if the content you provide on your blog attracts high paying ads you’re going to do significantly better. For example it has been documented that the PVR Blog is doing pretty well when it comes to high Adsense earnings - the secret of its success is partly due to it being served with ads that are high paying. The topic of the PVR blog is, as you’d expect, PVR technology including TiVo, Replay TV etc. This is cutting edge technology and therefore advertisers are willing to pay top dollar to get their products and services out there! In comparison if a person was to start a blog on ‘toothpicks’ I suspect the ads are not likely to pay very much. It would take very high traffic levels to earn as much from a toothpick blog as it would the PVR blog.
Relevant Ads - A second reason the PVR Blog is successful is that it servers relevant ads. To put it simply people looking for information on PVR technology are confronted by Adsense ads for PVR technology. I recently visited a blog that was having trouble getting relevant ads - they had a blog on Tourist destinations in Australia - but unfortunately they were getting Adsense ads for remote control cars. You can guess what their revenue was like. Increase the relevancy of your Ads to your content and you are one step closer to increasing your Adsense revenue.
Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads - One of the coolest things about the Adsense program is that they give you freedom in choosing the best position and color scheme for your ads. Just like in the wider world of advertising - positioning is a key element to an ads success. A Billboard positioned on a road where no one drives is not likely to get the same results as one positioned on a busy intersection. The position and design of your Adsense Ads is critical - if they are out of site they’ll never get clicked on.
Bringing them Together - The above four elements are in many ways pretty obvious when spelt out like this - the challenge comes to improving each to optimize Adsense revenue.
Your revenue will only grow as high as the weakest one of these factors on your blog. For example if you have high paying, relevant, well designed and positioned ads but no traffic you’ll not do well. Likewise if you have high traffic, high paying and relevant ads but they are poorly designed an in a position where they’ll never be seen - you’ll waste all your other hard work. Its not enough to work on one element.
How do we improve each? In the next four posts we’ll examine each area in turn and suggest a number of ways that you might try tweaking them to increase your revenue.

- Is Your Blog Suitable for Adsense?



Is your blog suitable for Adsense? - Before you rush into signing up for Adsense expecting it to earn you a million dollars it is worth asking the question of whether Adsense is the right revenue strategy for your blog. By no means is it the only option - you might like to check out this tip on other ways of making money from blogging.
Whilst there are some amazing success stories about earning big dollars with Adsense out there, it is worth taking a realistic look at some cold hard truths about the Adsense program.


Google does not accept every site that applies to the Adsense program.

*Google Adsense Program Policies indicate that the content of sites must not contain things like excessive profanity, pornography, illicit drugs etc. Basically your blog needs to have content that is reasonably ‘family friendly’.
*Also in their policy document is a reference to them not normally accepting pages of a personal nature. This is the topic of discussion in many Adsense forums and is obviously open to different interpretations. Many (if not most) blogs are personal in nature - however to maximize your chances of approval by Adsense a blog should be targeted on a particular topic/s. For example whilst this blog is often personal in nature - most of my individual posts (pages) focus on very specific themes which are repeated throughout the blog. update - this may have changed recently with Blogger now allowing blogger blogs to use Adsense.
*Sites accepted into the Adsense program are also required to be easily navigable, have an adequate quantity of text based content (don’t apply if you’ve been blogging a week) and be written in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, or Spanish. They may not to have excessive advertising or other contextual/competing advertising.
*Whilst not stated in the Adsense Policy document, many also believe that sites accepted into the program also need to have reasonable levels of traffic. If your blog is new, it may be worth waiting a few weeks or months before applying to build up traffic and content levels. Others speculate that a professionally designed, well-organized and privately hosted blog has a better chance of being accepted. The more professional and successful your blog appears the more likely it is to be accepted by Adsense.



If still in doubt after reading Google Adsense Program Policies you can email Google for clarification or just apply and see how you go.
Of course, acceptance by Google into the Adsense program does not guarantee your success. The fact remains that certain blogs will always be more successful than others at generating income.
Future posts in this series will focus upon strategies and tips for increasing your revenue but it should be stated here that the most successful sites are generally sites with very high traffic levels and/or content that is directly related to a particular product or service (the more targeted and niche-like the better).
It is also worth saying that Adsense works best on pages with lots of text content. It only reads text in determining ads, not images so make sure you have enough relevant content.
The next posts in this series will expand upon these aspects of successful blogging with Adsense with our Adsense Equation.

I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog - and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.
Covering costs of my Digital Photography Blog is why I originally signed up with Google Adsense - blogging can get expensive when you have high levels of traffic and a lot of pages.
Whilst the agreement you sign with Google stresses that you are not allowed to give specific information about your earnings from the program I can say that I’m glad I’ve signed up because its well and truly covered my costs - and then some. In fact I think its quite feasible to expect that Adsense coupled with other strategies for making money from Blogging could quite easily generate a decent living. It takes time and hard work, but I think its very doable. (Update: Since writing this series I’ve revealed that I am now looking at making over a six figure income this year in 2005 from blogging).
So how do I make money from Google Adsense? Let me share some AdSense Tips that heve helped me.
This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Let me say up front I’m no expert - there are a lot of people out there making a lot more money than I am using Adsense - however most of them are not telling their secrets - well not for free anyway. I’ve got no secrets to hide and am willing to share what I’ve learnt since I signed up for the program 8 months ago. If you want a REAL expert’s opinion on Adsense I’d recommend buying Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense E-Book. Joel earns $15,000 per month from Adsense and has some good things to share.
I know some bloggers are put off or offended by the idea of making money from blogging so I’ll try not to let these posts dominate my blog - however if you are not interested in the topic, simply skip over these posts.I am going to assume a few things in this series to cut down the amount of introductory comments I have to make. Here is what I am assuming:
You have a blog. Whilst most of the following tips will apply to other types of websites I run Adsense on blogs and will speak from that experience.
You have (or will) read a basic overview of Adsense and have some understanding of what it is.
You have(or will) read the program policies as outlined by Google. These give details of site eligibility, ad placements and other requirements for using the system.

Today, I finished the rest of my site design and went live. I must say, I think I did a pretty decent job-- following my plan of having a minimalist site design. At around 7pm, I signed up for a Google Adsense account. The plan for today was to apply so in a few days I could get approved and get the ads placed correctly. But to my surprise, I got the acceptance email less than 2 hours after I applied. That's awesome.

So I went ahead and designed the ads. The first one is placed at the top of the site, kind of like a banner. I know a lot of people mention making the ads look integrated into the site. I think I did a decent job of that. The color scheme fits-- however, when i designed the site, i added a distinct place for the ads. Well, the background of this designated section was a little darker than I thought it was-- don’t get me wrong, the ads look nice. The only problem is that it looks distinctly like an ad, not necessarily site content.
Its not as obtrusive, and its text based, and looks like if fits in with the site. The only difference is that the background isn’t white (like the rest of the site background).
If push comes to shove, I'll just lighten the background of the ad-section, which might help it blend in better.
I also added some horizontal ads at the bottom of profile pages. Since the profile pages are plain text black and white, i was able to fit the ads in very nicely. You can hardly tell its an add-- it almost looks like an option to "view more pics" of the user or something.
I got some of my friends to run through the site and give me feedback. Overall, I think I did a pretty good job. There are some non-critical things I’d like to fix-- mainly implementing a custom error.php page to serve up errors that people might run in to. i.e. somebody doesn’t have javascript, so they don’t enter a correct email and it isn’t caught by my javascript email verify function, I’ll need to let them know. But I want all errors to have a uniform page format. Which is why I want the dynamic php error page.

Today, I woke up and checked my Adsense account. A whopping $2.50! It was great. However, I still haven’t marketed the site-- so I have no idea where the clicks came from. But I sure aint complaining :-)I ran a bunch of tests to make sure the submission of posts worked for all kinds of inputs. It turns out there were a few problems that I hadn't considered before.

=

The PHP DOM API that I use to parse the XML that stores the user's post assumes that the input file is UTF-8 encoded (as per the XML specifications). However, I write the file using the default encoding and when I read the data back to parse it (ISO-8859-1 encoding) the dom parser function complains. The solution was a simple conversion function built in to PHP -- utf8_encode(). I call this function on the input data prior to writing to the file and the problem was solved.

=
Another DOM problem surfaced when I was testing inputs with another character-- the ampersand. It turns out that all XML parsers treat single ampersands as special characters. The parser choked whenever it encountered one, so I had to figure out how to get around it. The solution was to incorporate another character replacement entry in the same function I use to strip PHP slashes and kill left brackets (to avoid bad html).

=

The default cut-off length for the input was too small. At first I thought 800 characters was plenty. However, it would be trivial to increase this amount, and some people like to write paragraphs or post poems on their posts. So I increased the maximum post size to 1500 characters to account for it.


Later on in the day, I was checking out the search page. Adsense was showing a bunch of horoscope ads, which I don't think pays as much as dating ads. Plus, I would want to keep the ads as consistent as possible-- most of the other pages show dating ads. I remembered seeing something about filtering when I was configuring my Adsense account, so I logged back in to see if I could do anything about the problem. I saw a section about a "competitive ad filter" and figured I'd check it out. Apparently, you can select which domains to prevent from showing ads on your site.

Great! So I went back to UpHook and grabbed the domain names of these horoscope sites. Then I put them in the filter and refreshed the search page. I didn't see any change-- but I guess it would probably take a while to have an effect. Either way, I realized just how powerful this could be. By restricting certain domains, you can probably force Adsense to display the next-best match for ads. In my case, this would be the dating and personals ads. I feel like this is just another small detail that could make a decent impact in Adsense revenue. After all, it's the little things that matter.

The Heat Maps
Not really a tool. But for those people who don't know, this can increase your earnings substantially-- especially if you have ads in all the wrong places.
AdsenseAccelerator
I don't really know much about this site, other than some people apparently bought the tool and use it to easily find the best keywords. I'm not big on buying stuff, so I wouldn't really use it. But if anybody is interested in trying (or has already tried) it and doesn't mind paying a few bucks, feel free to let me know if its worth the money. I’ve heard good things about it.
----------------------
Getting the most out of AdSense hinges upon your ability to optimize. Using these tools can certainly help out. If you have (or plan to have) AdSense on your site/blog then I think its a very good idea to look at some of the tools out there and try to ensure that you are utilizing your ad space in a smart way.

Geeks Are Sexy] Tech. News

Great article. I think it's understandable to try to place the highest paying ads on your site. On the other hand, I was under the impression that Google was already trying to optimize your ads. Here is a rough equation for how you make money through AdSense:$ = # clicks x ad priceCouple points. (1) You could put higher paying ads on your site, but they might not get clicked as often as what would have been there. (2) Google is obviously trying to optimize the # of clicks you get on your site (relevent ads). It's also in Google's interest to put higher paying ads on your site as well. The more you make = the more they make.Now I don't know how Google's ad choosing algorithm works. Maybe someone who does can chime in. I'm just guessing. So it may still be profitable to choose your own ads using the tools in your article (after all it's very possible you are better at choosing ads for your site than Google is), but I just wanted to point this out.

I would like to jump right into the content of this article-- some of the best tools around for getting the most out of Google's Adsense campaign. First, we'll start off with the tools in order of personal preference from less useful to most useful (since there is really no good way to compare a tool-- its all in how you use it anyway).

#10Contextual Ads Preview/Comparison Tool

This tool is helpful in comparing AdSense ads to those of other advertisement vendors (Chitika, Yahoo). You also have the ability to customize the colors and view what ads a certain URL would be likely to display. It's a pretty solid tool when planning what type of advertisements you want to put on your page (especially if you are trying to decide which vendor to sign up with). ----------------------
#9Blacklist

The Blacklist basically gives you a list of AdWord publishers that have very low payouts. It is a fact that ad space is valuable-- I would rather fill my ad space with 3 publishers offering $0.50 per click than 3 publishers offering 1 or 2 cents. By providing a list of provider domains to avoid, you can filter your ads and have a greater chance of having high-paying publisher ads displayed on your site. According its website, Blacklist works by:"...providing you with list of most commonly filtered websites whose webmasters use AdWords to attract visitors for low price click so they can convert it to high price click on their own MFA (Made for AdSense) site(s). In order to STOP these type of actions going on your sites, all you need to do is to paste our specially generated list to your AdSense Setup -> Competitive Ad Filter list. Your revenue should substantially increase."Nuff said. ----------------------
#8AdSense Calculator

This is one of my favorite tools-- it allows you to quickly calculate how much you can make given daily impressions, CTR, and CPC. Although it’s certainly easy to calculate the values yourself, this is a resource you can use to quickly get that info. It computes daily, monthly, and yearly data for both clicks and earnings. From their website:"It also serves as a tool that will allow Google AdSense users to take their current statistics and get an idea of how much they can expect to see daily, monthly and yearly. As well as those who are considering implementing AdSense on their site what results they are likely to see."For those out there who like to speculate ("hmmm, if I had 3000 impressions and a CTR of 2% and average CPC of 30 cents, what could I make...?") this is THE tool for you-- quick, simple, and easy to use.----------------------
#7AdSense Sandbox

"This is a handy little utility if you would like to see what sort of Google AdSense ads are based on content or keywords. "This tool lets you see LOTS of ads that Adsense may be displaying on a site. Why is this good? Simply put, you can look at ads that show up for your competitor's site. And why is THAT good? You can use it to help out your own ad campaign. For example, I know Plenty of Fish (the free dating site with the ugly site design) makes a TON of money from ads. Since my site, UpHook, is in the same general category, I can look at what ads are showing up for them and see if those same sites show up on mine. If not, then I know I'm not really competing against them; and I also know that their ads are probably worth more per-click than my ads. In addition, this also gives me a list of what websites I may be competing against. And keeping an eye on one's competition is a smart move.----------------------
#6Adsense Preview Tool

(explorer)This tool is very similar to the Sandbox. The difference is that you can generate a preview of what ads may be displayed on a page much easier. Rather than visiting a website, you can bring up a pop-up window full of ad samples by right clicking and selecting the preview tool from the pop-up window. The upside: It's easy to access and gives good information (see Tool #7)The downside: It's for Internet Explorer----------------------
#5Adsense Notifier

(firefox)This is an invaluable tool for OC people who check adsense stats every 5 minutes. Checking adsense habitually is a painful process—its like watching grass grow. But this handy little extension makes it less of a headache. The Notifier can sit in the bottom of your browser window and displays whatever stats you want-- total clicks, daily earnings, impressions, CTR, etc. Wondering if you made any more money yet? You can find out with a quick glance. It’s highly configurable and can save you bunch of time. ----------------------
#4Competitive Ads Filter

Now we're getting to the heavy hitters. This tool is actually part of the Adsense setup manager, so you have to already have an AdSense account to use it. You can use the ad filter to block specific ads from appearing on your pages. Simply give the filter a list of URLs and they are effectively prevented from displaying on your site/blog. This can be useful for a few reasons:1- You can prevent competition form advertising on your site. This could directly benefit from you by helping to ensure that people stay on your site and not jump on the first ad offering the same thing your site does. Due to the targeted-advertisement nature of AdSense, if you have a service site there is a good chance that your competition will have ads showing up on your site all the time. For example, all the ads that show up on my site (free personals, etc) are for other sites offering dating and personals and matchmaking, etc. For some people this is bad-- but for others it can be a good thing.2- You can prevent irrelevant ads from being displayed. I mentioned this in a previous blog post-- there are some cases where you want to get rid of ads that don't really correlate well with your site content. Remember, AdSense is just a software system-- it tries to determine what ads to serve up based on some site content. There is a chance that it can guess wrong. And when that happens, you can use the filter to help correct things. Have a site about dogs being cooler than cats but AdSense shows a bunch of ads about pro-cat books? Just chug the bogus cat sites into the filter and you'll be all set. 3- You can block publishers that have low-paying ads. This is helpful in making sure you get the best value for your space. Using the Blacklist tool to get a list of low-paying publishers and plugging their domains into your competitive ads filter can quite possibly earn you more money in the long run.These are all good uses for the filter, however, there is a drawback to using this tool-- if you are trying to filter entire groups of content by using the filter, you will only see temporary results. As more sites pop up, you will likely have to keep updating the filter. This is why this tool is best suited for blocking sites that are in direct competition with yours.----------------------
#3Word Tracker

I know some people who swear by this tool. Although you have to sign up to get unlimited access to the service, the trial will probably give provide enough useful information for you to enhance your AdSense experience. Word Tracker pretty much tells you how often people search for a specific keyword. It can also estimate how many competing sites use those keywords. This is probably the best tool to use before deciding what content to include on your page. If there are a lot of competitors, it may be better to target one of the less-searched-for words. Chances are, you will be able to get indexed higher in a search engine for those terms as opposed to going head-to-head with the competition for the popular words. Obviously, this can drive traffic to your site. Users are more likely to visit matches that show up within the first 2 or 3 pages of a Google search than they are to visit matches on page 87. Why not opt for being indexed in the first 1-50 matches? Sure, you will get less searches overall, but you will be much more visible.According to their website:"Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client's business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors."This tool is can be used for things other than AdSense. However, it just so happens that popular search keywords are also popular AdSense keywords. Go figure.----------------------
#2Overture Bidding Tool

This tool gives you both suggested keywords AND sample bid amounts given a target word. Although Overture is NOT the same as AdSense, the keywords are almost the same as those suggested when signing up for an AdSense account. In addition, I've found that the bids listed are pretty darn close to those offered by AdWords publishers. Using this tool, it would be trivial to build a list of high-paying keywords that you would want to make sure you use in your content.If you ensure that mostly high-paying ads are displayed on your site, you will be getting the most out of your ad space. Think about it-- a user isn’t going to know how much each ad is worth before they click it. They are likely to click on almost any ad that appeals to them. Why not make sure that those ads will pay the most money? Using the Overture bidding tool to get other suggested keywords is also useful-- however, be careful not to saturate your page content with a bunch of keywords. This can make your site/blog look tacky. A few here and there should be enough for the AdSense spider to throw up high-paying ads. Combined with the Blacklist, this is an excellent tool to use as an alternative to the AdWords Bidding Tool.----------------------
#1AdWords Bidding Tool/Traffic Estimator

This is probably the most useful tool out there. The only drawback is that you must have an AdWords account to get access to the information. I would suggest getting AdWords anyway, since it gives you a good idea of what publishers go through and what options they have when creating ads. This bidding tool is THE resource for figuring out what keywords result in the highest paying AdSense ads. It's quite possible that all those pages and blogs that list the Top X-number of highest paying AdSense keywords use the bidding information found through AdWords or Overture. As a site/blog owner, its important to know what words you might want to emphasize in your content. The traffic estimator will take a set of keywords and tell you the estimated average CPC based on current publisher bidding statistics. Knowing that the estimated CPC of my keywords can pull ads paying between $3 and $8 on average, I know that I am in a very good position to make money from my AdSense advertising. Although these CPCs are average values, and I'm sure Google will only show those ads on very well-performing sites, it at least lets me know what I have to look forward to when I start bringing in a larger amount of traffic.

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….

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 let?s be honest increasing your web site traffic is much easier said than done. So, let?s 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 don?t 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 won?t know what?s working the best for you on your web site unless you track the different things that you?re experimenting with. Set up a few Google AdSense channels for the different ads that you?ll be placing on your website. Then just see which channels are working the best and stick to those.

That?s 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 I?ve 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!

20 June last year, Wall Street Journal runs an article, saying Google has plans to offer PayPal-like services. At that time, the popular name among analyst was “Google Wallet”.

Google Inc. this year plans to offer an electronic-payment service that could help the Internet-search company diversify its revenue and may put it in competition with eBay Inc.’s PayPal unit, according to people familiar with the matter.

Exact details of the search company’s planned service aren’t known. But the people familiar with the matter say it could have similarities with PayPal, which allows consumers to pay for purchases by funding electronic-payment accounts from their credit cards or checking accounts.

Some consumers like PayPal for the security it offers, since it allows them to share their banking or credit-card numbers only with PayPal without having to divulge the information to merchants.

Officials of Google and PayPal declined to comment.

Gary Price of Search Engine Watch did some research and found that two months before that, Google Inc filed the paperwork with the California Secretary of State and formed the Google Payment Corporation.

One year forward, after many news and speculations, and going through two name changes (it was called Google Purchase before finally changed to GBuy), Google’s payment service is finally reaching its official launch.

According to Forbes, GBuy is set to launch on 28 June.

Consumers using GBuy, which is set for release on June 28, will be taken off the merchant’s site to complete the payment. This will enable Google to capture e-commerce transaction data, driving more precise targeting in future searches.

“If harnessed, the precision of this targeting could be revolutionary,” wrote RBC analyst Jordan Rohan in a report Friday.

Update : Apparently, the latest name for the Google payment service is Google Checkout .

Update : paikia spotted the payment service being used at Picasa Web, and the finalized name is Google Purchase.

Note: I do not condone or encourage cheating on Google AdSense or any advertiser network. This article is indeed written to show why you should NOT use clickbot. If you want to increase your earning, there are legal and easier ways. Read 100 Google AdSense Tips.

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. Or it might be installed voluntarily by the click-network members.

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. Read 100 Google AdSense Tips.

If you applied for AdSense account with intention to cheat and earn fast bucks, I hope by now you have understood that you shouldn’t.
Why? You say. Google is so rich, losing some pennies won’t hurt.
Well. Probably. But when I say you shouldn’t, trust me. You really shouldn’t. These are just some reasons:

1. You can’t cheat Google

Every once in while, someone will comes out with ingenious idea of how to get more money from AdSense in less than honorable ways. He will announce to the whole world, posting in every forum and tell people how smart he is. His idea is always untraceable by Google, it is always original, and it always gives easy money.
What he doesn’t know is, few months after that, he will get caught by Google, always. And his AdSense account will be disabled. Always. And he is from ever applying for AdSense account again. Always.

Google is a giant, with 2005 revenue of almost US$ 10 billions, and profits of more than US$ 1 billion. A large chunk of this comes from Adwords / AdSense advertisements.
More click fraud means less trust, less advertisers and less money, to the extent that if unsolved it will bring collapse to pay-per-click advertisement business. Now. Do you think Google will let you jeopardize their billion dollar business model?
They have money and ability to bring together many of the the smartest and brightest engineers and scientists on earth, has been doing that and will continue to do so. How smart do you think you are that you can outsmart collaborative effort of the brightest brains?
You might be able to pull through for two or three months, but eventually the fraud detection algorithm will catch up and you are caught. And you get banned from Google AdSense, among other things.

2. Cheating = stealing

No matter how you want to justify, face it, cheating is stealing. You are not only stealing from Google, but also from Adwords publishers. Majority of these are are not big companies, but small webmasters depending on Internet to make a living.
Moreover, even if your morality (or lack thereof) permits stealing from your own fellow, bear in mind that stealing is illegal. Regardless of whether it is done offline or online, a crime is a crime. You might get jailed for that.
In fact, Google has started to bring AdSense fraudsters to court a few months ago. Some were jailed, and some others were fined heavily.

3. It is just too easy to earn more, legally

Let’s say you managed to cheat AdSense undetected. You don’t use clickbot or proxy or click-ring or paid clickers. You managed to somehow get the clicks from distributed IP. You don’t use pop-ups, spyware, adware. You are careful that your CTR does not exceed 10%. Still, your earning is limited. There is a cap you can’t cross, else you will invite unwanted attention to your account.
With so much effort to cover your traces, actually you will get better result if you concentrate your effort to improve the website.
Write more contents, submit articles, improve on your search engine optimisation, improve adsense placement, and you can get the same earning or even more. Sure it will take some time, but this is legitimate.

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.

Tag:

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.
Tag:





…


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.





…


Some 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.




…


3) 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.

If you are interested to find out, read this blog: SEO Black Hat. Don’t be deceived by the name. It is a great site covering both white-hat and black-hat SEO techniques.

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.