Optimization Tips

Ad Location - "the middle, above the fold location perform best." Also "if you have an article page with a long body of text, the bottom of that article is actually pretty successful"
Ad Formats - "the top three formats are the 336x280 that you see on the page; the 300x250 medium rectangle; and then the 160x600 wide skyscraper." Additionally "the wider ad formats are doing better than the other ones and the reason is that they actually take up fewer lines. And so with every additional line, you have a chance of losing that interested user."
Ad Colors - Pick colors that blend well with the site. Matches the background color, and compliments the site. Make them feel like a part of the site. They give an example where a customer went from blended background to yellow, and clicks dropped 65%
Ad Blindness - if the colors stick out too much, readers may immediatly identify them as ads and not even look at them. Also frequent readers may stop reading ads so you could alternate positioning and colors to get their attention. "The more you blend in with the site, the less chance that ad blindness will occur."
Experiment - this was a big theme in the webinar echoed by all experts. Use channels to test different colors, positioning, and formats to find out what works best. They show that you can more than double your revenue just by finding the right color, position, format combo.
Image Ads - If you want to maximize revenue they recommend turning them on. I personally disable them in my account, because I find them too distracting/annoying to the user. Yes you may increase your CPC, but you will probably decrease impressions over time.
Link Units - Don't take up much space, and also "allows the user to refine what they're interested in. So if they may not be interested in specific ads on your page, 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." I also bet google remembers what they click on and then tries to generate better ads for the page... just my speculation.
AdSense For Search - You can use this for your site search, and you get a percentage of ad clicks.
Focus on Content - Duh!
Don't click on your own ads - One of the callers asked the question "I was just noticing that someone asked about clicking on their own ads and it says you're not supposed to. And I don't remember reading that. And I occasionally do click on the ads... So is that detrimental in some way?" - I can't believe they said that to google. Google's response was: "Yes, that's sort of chief among the terms and conditions".
Impression Counter - Google confirmed that Page Impressions are counted when a public service ad (or alternate ad url or color) is displayed.
Your site is unique - all these things may not matter, the best location, format, and color is different for every site. So again, go experiment.

Useful Adsense Tips

Learning Adsense tricks should be mastered by every site owner. For beginners, this task is important, since this goal would help in building a website. Besides, most people outgrow the fancy of creating sites and instead build sites for money, thus they could choose between a single site for big profit or a hundred sites for a dollar gain.

Once the person has decided on the kind of website he wants, it's time to apply Adsense. Apart from its importance during at the start of the site's creation, Adsense could also be used once the site starts to receive high traffic. The first thing to do when applying Adsense is to get high hit keywords which are the ones to bring more profit to your site. But after sometime, an evaluation of keywords must be performed, since some keywords don't really earn anything and just clog traffic and space in the website. Thus, these keywords must be removed to prevent jeopardizing the site.

Another of the Adsense tricks concerns the location and sizes of the ads. Google advises that ads be placed both at the center and left portion of the web page, since these are the spots where ads are easily noticed. Ads also are visibly better if they come in sizes such as large rectangle 336×280, inline rectangle 300×250, or wide skyscraper 160×600.

Other useful Adsense tricks involve putting generic images on top of the ad to attract visitors and possibly, linking with other sites to generate more income.

Keystone Websites

Creating a website need not be an expensive and complicated process. Catering to the needs of individuals and small businesses is difficult for large web design houses, because building a smaller-scale website rarely yields enough to cover their overheads. Unfortunately, many of the small-scale web design shops lack the kind of talent needed to build a site that looks professional and functions properly.

Keystone Websites has been created specifically to fulfill this need. We prefer to work with you on a one-on-one basis to create your web presence, tailor-made to your budgetary requirements. Our desire is to build a relationship, because a website grows with your needs and ambitions, and requires continuous nuturing. We will employ the latest web technologies and utilize the most up-to-date standards to implement a solution that is elegant, accessible, and secure.
To help demystify the web design process, we have created an easy-to-follow guide that describes what happens as we build your website. The guide is supplemented by a comprehensive glossary of terms, for your convenience. An understanding of the basic process gives you the power to shape that process to suit your needs. But just as there is no need to understand how a car engine works to be a driver, there is similarly no need to understand the mechanics of a web page to be a useful contributor to the design process. Our goal is to empower you with the ability to have as much, or as little involvement as you like.
Digital Keystone's mission is to be the leading provider of information solutions and services.
Our goal is to increase our clients' efficiency and profitability by making business processes easier to conduct and manage.
Our success will yield sustainable prosperity to staff and our associates
The W3C note on XHTML media types is not very specific about how XHTML should be served. Use of the word "should" creates ambiguity, which may be why Ian Hickson felt compelled to write about it. For your convenience, we have re-worked a table from the document's summary

US Mower:
Based in Washington state, US Mower is a supplier of industrial mowing equipment. Keystone Websites was tasked with modernizing the existing website. Out went the code-heavy pages created in Microsoft Publisher, to be replaced by lean, hand-coded XHTML. The new site has an improved structure, together with substantial performance gains and a corresponding decrease in overhead.



The existing visual design was fairly robust, so Keystone Websites created a new look that was an evolution of what came before. The red, white, and blue theme was carried over to complement the company's logo, which itself was slightly reworked to give it a modern feel. A special page was created to act as a host for various product video clips. The total development time for the site was about 2 weeks, and all communication between the client and Keystone Websites took place via email.



US Mower distributes products through an extensive network of dealers around the United States and Canada. To assist the user, the dealer in the directory has links to their respective websites, as well as links to Google-based location maps.

Just Photo:
On this project, Simon Jessey of Keystone Websites was given a functional specification for a website that had to provide information and photography services for a photographer based in Hamburg, PA. The specification was a document containing information on style, color, content, and structure. Keystone Websites worked closely with the client to produce the desired result, from the initial visual design concept to the testing and deployment.



The site is hand-coded using a combination of HTML, CSS, and Microsoft's ASP (Active Server Pages) technology. Sophisticated CSS float techniques were used to create the gallery pages, and a fully-functional control panel was built so that the client could alter many of the site's dynamic features. The total development time of the site was 5 weeks.

The Queen Bean Coffee Bar & Cafe:

The Queen Bean Coffee Bar & Cafe is a collaborative effort. Simon Jessey, senior designer at Keystone Websites, worked with a small group of talented individuals to produce this dynamic website. The group was given a brief to design a site for a small, Pennsylvania-based coffee bar from scratch. The site had to be built using Macromedia's ColdFusion server-side language, and provide E-commerce capabilities with the PayPal shopping cart system.

The site features a welcoming Flash animation (delivered within a pop-up), a Flash-based "menu", and a fully-featured control panel that enables the client to alter any dynamic feature of the site. Total development time was 10 weeks, including client consultation and liaison.

Payper Clicks Returns

There is no doubting the success of Google's Adsense program. Even Yahoo! and Kanoodle have joined in on the game, offering to join publishers with advertisers. Given the right circumstances, its a win / win situation for both.

There have been many sites that promote Top Paying Keywords and how if you add these keywords you can instantly improve your Adsense revenue. However, if you really want to see a dramatic increase in pay per clicks, you need to ensure 2 very important areas are addressed. They seem very obvious, but many site owners miss the opportunity to attract higher paying ads simply because they ignore these two areas.

Optimization

Many "would be" web designers decide to build a site around the highest paying keywords, yet, forget to optimize their site around a specific keyword. Instead, they forget the basics of how to properly create a title tag, page description, keyword density and having clean search engine spider friendly code.

Remember, its the source code that the Adsense and Kanoodle programs are using to decide what ads will appear. If your top 2 keywords are "insurance" and "downloads", you may find that you end up with ads regarding "insurance downloads" which of course will not pay much.

Also, having a high keyword density score for the keyword can get you into trouble with the search engines (specifically Google). Keywords spamming is never a good idea. Optimize your page and you will search more hits to that page and not confuse the bots that create the ads for you.

Content

This is by far the most important and most missed tips. If you are going to include top paying keywords on your site, remember, if you want to attract high paying ads, you need to be selling your visitor on what your advertiser wants. Your content should sell to the visitors needs. Why should your visitor consider car insurance? What are the benefits of car insurance? Where can they get the best quotes? If you pique the interest of your visitor, they are more likely to click on your ads than if they feel that they are not getting the information they came to your site for in the first place.

Your content should have a specific flow to it. If you start jamming keywords into your content, your visitor will automatically suspect that you are trying to deceive them. Once you do that, they are gone! Why waste your visitors time after working so hard to get them to your site in the first place?

Well optimized, focused content will always produce better, higher paying ads. That is why you are a publisher: you want those high paying ads on your site. What use though are those high paying keywords if your content doesn't pique your visitors curiosity? Be passionate about your content, and the click through rates will skyrocket!

Its also important to make sure that you are using the right number of ads per page, but that is for another article!

Simple Ads Makes Better

Newsletter advertising has been getting a bad rap lately. Around every corner you can find someone complaining about how it doesn’t work. But when you ask them if they’ve tried it, most say no. The others who have, had NO idea what they were doing. Today we’re going to talk about exactly what kind of solo ads sell and what factors are important. Let’s start by going through the process of publishing a solo ad.

1. Choose a newsletter/ezine to publish in. 2. Write the solo ad 3. Write an effective title 4. Design the website where your visitors will go...

1. Choose a newsletter/ezine

Extremely important. You must do your best to choose the most targeted group possible. You must choose a “good-sized” list. Also, the group must be responsive.

The best searching technique is to go to the websites in your niche market that are popular and find the links that say “advertising” or “advertise with us.” It’s normally quite self-explanatory from there...

I personally recommend going for no newsletter with less than 5,000 members – unless they are extremely targeted and very responsive. To determine how responsive a group is – ALWAYS ask or look for testimonials from others who have advertised before. If the publisher is unwilling to provide these – don’t waste your time promoting there.

2. Write the Solo Ad

One word – story. That’s the BEST way to sell someone something – tell them a story. Most people are so skeptical now every time they receive an e-mail that the only real way to warm up to them is to tell them a story.

Start talking about how you went from a “nothing” to having this great success. Or, how you went from not knowing anything about “such and such” to now becoming an expert.

The next tip is to give them a “feeling” of what they are about to learn – *start* to teach them about the topic and then say “O...to learn the rest, click here.”

I’ve learned that the best solo ad never sells a thing, it only pre-sells and warms up to the reader. I guess this is where the theory of “Pre-Sell” prevails.

3. Write an Effective Title

Quite possibly the MOST important part of your entire campaign. Don’t underestimate the readers of the ezine. They *know* when the regular issue comes and when the solo ads come. They’re already skeptical. If you want to catch their eye, you better have a title that really appeals to them.

Here are some good title tips:

A) Use Numbers - ex/ How to Get 2000+ Targeted Visitors A Day instead of “How to Get Traffic”

B) Be Specific – Your title should reveal EXACTLY what you talk about…

C) Keep It Short – The shorter the title, the more it will be read…

D) Avoid SPAM words – Don’t use “FREE” “MONEY” – These words are turn-offs now…

If you can write an effective title, you’ve one half the battle already!

4. Design the website where your visitors go...

The BIGGEST mistake (in my opinion) is to simply send the traffic to your main site.

I recommend you set-up a SEPARATE website for THAT particular ezine. Make that visitor feel as if he/she is VIP for coming in from that newsletter. Greet them with a “Hey! Glad you could make it from “INSERT NAME HERE” to our site!This makes your site more personal and the visitor feels more comfortable reading your message.

A quick tip for your website: Always talk about the success YOU had with the program you are selling – tell a story and reveal how well YOU did with it. You will see a HUGE increase in sales.

Once again, people want stories and they want storied about YOU.

If you apply these four factors the “right” way, you’re bound to do extremely well with Solo Ads. Personally, I make thousands a month selling my consulting service using Solo Ads – so, no one can tell me they don’t work.

Google Improved Adsense with Ad Links

Google Inc. has introduced a feature into its AdSense advertising program that increases the number of text ads tied to a Web page. The feature, called Ad Links, also improves the relevance between the ads and the Web page's content.

In the AdSense program, Web site publishers insert Google code into their Web pages, which generates text ads that are relevant to each page's content. The ads are sold by Google to advertisers and are distributed to publishers who participate in AdSense. When a visitor clicks on an ad, Google pays the publisher.

Google believes Ad Links will benefit Web site visitors, advertisers and publishers, said Shuman Ghosemajumder, Ad Links product manager. "It helps users by giving them a greater choice of ads they can select from. Meanwhile, advertisers benefit from additional distribution they're gaining. And for publishers there's a higher likelihood visitors will click on ads," he said.

Ad Links has been designed as a complement to the contextual ads served through AdSense. Publishers who sign up for Ad Links will still receive the AdSense ads. But with Ad Links, publishers will also get a list of topics that are contextually related to the content of their page. When a visitor clicks on an item on that topic list, he is taken to another Web page with related text ads.

For example, a page about vacationing in Hawaii will feature AdSense text ads about that content. But it's possible that not all visitors who land on that page are looking specifically for information about vacationing in Hawaii. They may be looking for other type of information about Hawaii or about vacationing in general, he said.

In that case, the visitor is unlikely to click on the AdSense ads. However, with Ad Links, the page could feature a list of topics related to Hawaii and vacationing, which, when clicked upon, would serve up corresponding ads, broadening both the scope and quantity of the ads available to the visitor.

The Ad Links topic list has been designed to be unobtrusive and not clutter the space devoted to ads on a page, Ghosemajumder said. "It integrates very well with the navigation structure of sites," he said. The Ad Links feature is ready now and is already being implemented by Web site publishers, he said. It is available in the 22 languages AdSense supports.

Another enhancement Mountain View, Calif.-based Google is readying is the ability for publishers to have AdSense payments deposited directly into their bank accounts via Electronic Funds Transfer technology, he said. This feature is currently being tested.

Adsense Tips for Success

If you're like many marketers, you've had limited success with the Google content network. Given the improvements Google's made over the last year, you may want to give the content network another look, particularly if you've been running Google content campaigns using the same campaign structure used in your search campaign. That method may not represent the right strategy and implementation to capture the interest of a content user.

In my last column, I examined some recent changes to the Google content system involving display advertising. But most of you don't have graphical media (ad creative) handy, nor do you have the resources or the inclination to produce the banners needed to run display media in Google's or another's network. If you want to leverage high levels of incremental visibility, clicks, and content, your primary option is good old text links, served contextually. If you're lucky, you can even justify your increased keyword-targeted spending by managing your campaign to the same ROI (define) metrics used for your search campaign.

Google's AdSense provides huge additional reach, but the conversion rate on contextual traffic is often dramatically lower on the content networks than from pure search. Even with separate campaigns and Google's smart pricing algorithms supposedly bringing things into line, taking effective advantage of the content network is often challenging. Growing a campaign and extracting additional profitable clicks from the keyword-targeted media ecosystem are never easy, but after your pure search campaign has gone through several iterations of expansion and tuning, the only way (other than fighting a bidding war and raising bids while ROI drops) is to expand the campaign by trying (or retrying) content targeting.

Content is not search. So if you've tested and continue to use the same campaign structure for content that works well in search, you may be missing huge opportunities. To maximize reach and opportunity you need to treat content differently because:

* Consumers who are surfing aren't searching. Ads are incidental to the content being consumed. Thus, there's no search scent to craft ads around. The surfers aren't looking for a keyword and scanning the page the way they do in a SERP (define). Consumers aren't as likely to be in the final stages of the buying cycle, so the ad copy that works in search may not be the optimal ad copy for content-driven advertising. Try different ads in a contextual environment to retune your campaign.

* Contextual advertising is targeted at the AdGroup level, not keyword level. This means your account structure may not be optimal. Certain combinations of keywords within AdGroups may work particularly well or appeal to the Google targeting engine.

* Google gives content ads a different Quality Score. So any changes you make to improve perceived relevance of the ads in a contextual environment helps lower costs and increase click volume simultaneously.

* You can create different mixes of AdGroups with similar keyword and creative to capture a greater number of impressions due to the AdGroup-targeting feature in Google. For example, you can add keywords, combine them, add synonyms, create phrases, and change match types (although Broad Match may deliver the greatest impression volume). There's actually a firm, AdMetrica, that specializes in creating lots of iterations of a Google content campaign to garner additional volume. You can do initial testing of this concept yourself.

* Your landing page, which was tested and tuned for the search visitor, may not have the optimal mix of information for a visitor from a contextual ad. Consider what a browser might want to learn compared to a shopper closer to making a decision.

* You can apply segmentation modeling to the new contextual tests just as you would with search. For example, perhaps one way to get your metrics into compliance with your targets (cost per lead, cost per order, return on advertising spending, ROI, or other success metric) is to do a day-parting analysis in conjunction with a geo-segmentation analysis. Nearly all the same segmentation tools used in search exist for content ads.

* You can consider site targeting along with all the above methods. Some of the sites in Google's network have high volumes and, in conjunction with the above methods, you may be able to tune your campaigns to generate the visibility, traffic, and profit you need.

Search inventory is so precious and scarce that we all get a little myopic, focusing our marketing and optimization efforts exclusively on the SERP. However, growing one's business exclusively on search is a game of diminishing marginal returns after a few years. To stimulate your customer's demand instead of simply harvesting it, consider the content network. It's changed a lot recently, and every indication is it will continue to change. Content is keyword-targeted, which is something we're all used to. We just need to work at getting contextual advertising to work harder for us.

Get more Adsense Clicks

New way to get more AdSense clicks

How to counteract AdSense blindness

If you've been online long enough to remember how banner blindness developed, you'll love Jay Young's brand new technique for encouraging more people to click on AdSense ads.


CONTENTS:

1. New way to get more clicks on AdSense ads
2. Ken Evoy gives away ANOTHER ebook
3. Seven easy ways to create bonuses
4. Thought for today: Quality of life


============================================
1. New way to get more clicks on AdSense ads
============================================

Remember what happened with banner ads? In the early days of the Internet, a high percentage of website visitors clicked on the banners, curious to see what was being advertised.

However, after a while people developed "banner blindness". They learned to tune out banners and just didn't even see most of them any more.

In the same way, if you use boring AdSense ads, you get "AdSense blindness". So webmasters use different techniques to force their ads to stand out, to keep people clicking on the ads.

Jay Young has come up with an absolutely brilliant idea.

He wraps colorful, eye-catching graphics around his AdSense ads, making it impossible for you to miss them.

After testing and finding out how well this works, he's made it easy for you to do it, too.

I think this idea is absolutely brilliant.

Be quick for this. Grab it at the introductory price before it goes up on Tuesday.

I have.

Have a look and see what you think...

http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/adsense-backgrounds


====================================
2. Ken Evoy gives away ANOTHER ebook
====================================

Hot on the heels of giving away "Make Your Site SELL" - http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/myss - Ken Evoy is giving another ebook.

It's a book which is vitally important for affiliates, "Make Your Content PREsell!".

Ken is a PREselling evangelist. He wrote the only book on the topic.

PREselling is one of the most misunderstood skills in affiliate marketing. To succeed as an affiliate, you MUST know how to PREsell. It can make or break your affiliate business.

I strongly recommend you grab this free ebook.

Get it here now...

http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/mycps


====================================
3. Seven easy ways to create bonuses
====================================

A popular super affiliate technique is to give away bonuses to encourage people to buy using your affiliate link.

But how much time are you prepared to spend creating bonuses?

Dan Lok describes seven ways to create bonuses quickly and easily...

http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/articles/500/1/Seven-easy-ways-to-create-bonuses


======================================
4. Thought for today: Quality of life
=====================================

"The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to that person's committment to excellence, regardless of the chosen field of endeavor." - Vince Lombardi.

Keyword research for AdSense pages

8 ways to do keyword research for AdSense pages

1. If you have a Google AdWords account, pretend you are planning to advertise using different keywords, and see how much you'd have to pay. That will give you a good indication of the popularity of the keywords.

Here's how. Follow these steps. In step 2, "Create Ad Group", click on "Calculate Estimates" and "Recalculate Estimates". These show you the maximum you would have to pay per click to advertise for particular keywords or key phrases.

For finding new key phrases, you can use Go to Google's AdWords and find out how much advertisers are willing to pay for the keywords or key phrases you're interested in. Here's how.

Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and play around with the free Keyword Tool.

For example, try putting in a keyword or phrase, such as "book" and click on "Get More Keywords". Pretend you're willing to pay the maximum per click the tool allows - 100. (You can choose any currency. I chose US.)

Over on the right side of the page, make sure that "Cost and position estimates" is selected.

The tool will calculate for you the estimated average CPC (cost per click) for a whole lot of words and phrases. Try entering a different word, say "debt" or "free", click on "Re-calculate" and watch how the CPC changes.

You DON'T have to choose a topic which has expensive keywords. Often topics that have expensive keywords are very competitive. You may do better choosing a less competitive niche with cheaper keywords.
Sign up for AdWords.

2. Keywords Analyzer is a superb tool which can generate thousands of key phrases that people are typing into search engines. If you have a Wordtracker account, you can also import data from Wordtracker and analyze it. It shows you, for example, how many advertisers have ad campaigns at AdWords for each phrase. If you're using AdSense, the more advertisers the better!

3. Have a look at the top 100 keywords on 7search. This will give you a quick idea of keywords that people are willing to pay big money for. You can also type phrases into the 7Search Keyword Suggestion Tool. This is just step one of your keyword research. You'll want to dig deeper.

4. At FindWhat pay-per-click search engine you can do a search for any phrase and quickly see how much advertisers are paying per click.

5. You can experiment typing words into Yahoo! Search Marketing's View Bids Tool. Let's say you type in "asbestos cancer". The top three advertisers often pay about $12 per click. So that might be an good choice for a topic - provided you're a specialist on mesothelioma AND provided that your research shows that it's an in-demand topic.

For "debt consolidation", the top two advertisers often pay more than $9 per click.

6. The free Web Marketing Keyword Bid Research Tool speeds up your research at Yahoo! Search Marketing. Type in a keyword and learn how much advertisers are paying per click and also find out how many searches were done on that keyword last month.

However, you need to know that Yahoo! combines singular and plural phrases, and robots are used to check bids. Both of these factors tend to distort the results you'll see. Checking Yahoo! Search Marketing is good for quick, rough research, nothing more.

7. You can use Wordtracker to look for the 1,000 most popular keywords. You can also use it to compile a useful list of keywords relating to one topic. If you buy it for a day or a week, you can do a lot of research in that time. It's the tool the professionals use.

Wordtracker has a free trial, but it's fairly limited. You can subscribe for as little as one day and do an awful lot of keyword research in that time. I have an annual account because I use it so frequently for keyword research.

8. The brainstorming and research tools in Site Build It! are my favorite way to do brainstorming for keywords that are in high demand and low supply. SBI is a superb tool - actually, a suite of tools. It's an all-in-one web hosting, site-building and web marketing tool. Type in a keyword and SBI Manager will present you with dozens of profitable keywords - ones with high demand and low supply. It can present them in order of profitability. Drill down, and you'll get dozens more profitable keywords.

SBI also has an "Analyze It" tool that helps you build keyword-rich pages that rank highly in search engines. It's simply superb. I use it and love it.

Site Build It! is an excellent choice for quickly building large, simple sites designed to rank highly in search engines - which makes it perfect for generating lots of AdSense revenue. Check it out.

QUICK SUMMARY: Build useful, simple sites - one topic per page - using valuable key phrases that are high in demand and low in supply. For researching, building and promoting easy-to-build sites that rank high in search engines, there's one suite of tools that's head and shoulders above all the rest - Site Build It!

12 mistakes affiliates make - and how to fix them

12 mistakes affiliates make - and how to fix them

Affiliates struggling to earn $100 a month often find it hard to believe that other people could possibly earn as much as $10,000 or even $100,000 a month in commissions.

Believe it. Big commissions do happen. And you can expect to hear about even bigger commissions.

Forrester Research predicts that affiliate programs and affiliate networks will produce $280 billion annually in e-commerce sales by 2008.

In most programs, 5% of the affiliates generate the vast majority of the sales. If you're not in that 5% and want to be, you'll have to change what you're doing.

Here are 12 mistakes you could be making, and how to fix them.

1. Are you telling people how to make money on the Internet when you don't know how yourself?

Perhaps - just perhaps - you can succeed at this, but it's the most obvious trap into which new affiliates fall. You join a few affiliate programs and set up a site offering Internet marketing tips, work-from-home tips, instant-business tips, or be-your-own-boss tips.

The advantages of doing this include having great products to promote, high commissions and lots of help from Internet marketers.

However, if you do this, you face two massive challenges.

1. You'll have hundreds of thousands of web pages out there competing with yours.

2. You're competing with the planet's best marketing EXPERTS. Some of the brightest brains in Internet marketing are working full-time to grab the attention of your target audience.

I'm not saying you can't succeed in this field, but if you're new to affiliate programs, this is definitely NOT the best place to begin. If you're struggling, find a less well traveled path.

You don't have to abandon your existing website. Just launch a new one based on a new theme. Later, when you've learned more and really have something to offer, it will be time to revamp your marketing tips site

How AdSense matches ads to web pages

How AdSense matches ads to web pages

Google is doing a good job of finding ads that are highly relevant to the web pages.

Google says:

"We go beyond simple keyword matching to understand the context and content of web pages. Based on an algorithm that includes such factors as keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the overall link structure of the web, we know what a page is about, and can precisely match Google ads to each page."

Occasionally Google gets it wrong. It places great importance on the file name. So be sure to use important keywords in the file name of each page, such as "contextual-advertising.html" for an article on contextual advertising.

Also, watch out for your anchor text - the words in the links on your page. We've found that sometimes if irrelevant ads are being served, you can fix the problem by rewriting anchor text.

You can check the relevance of the ads by looking at the text ads near the top-right of this page.

Adsense Program Tips

Google just released a Newbie Central for their AdSense program, those ads webmasters can include on their site to earn money for every click on the ad from a visitor (if you're using the program, part of the advertiser budget will go to you, and the other part to Google). I wanted to add some tips from my own experience:

1. Ads can work well in-between other stuff. On a games site of mine, some of the games don't contain ads next to the game area; the AdSense ad will only be shown in-between game rounds. This is the time the visitor is not concentrating on performing a task but might take a small break, and be open to the option of visiting new sites.

2. Put too much emphasis on AdSense and your site may be linked to less. The more available space you dedicate to AdSense on your site, and the less you differentiate between ads and content in your design, the more money you earn with the program, right? Not quite. While pushing the AdSense may result in short-term gains, it might also convince some visitors that the site is too crowded to be worth visiting again. And some of those visitors may also be bloggers or other people who might otherwise help to promote your site with links to it. And the less your site gets linked to, the less traffic it gets, meaning AdSense revenues may go down in the long term.

3. Even if you get huge traffic, the AdSense income from the site is more dependent on the site type and audience. Google targets AdSense ads automatically to the site content. Or at least, it does so ideally – but some types of content fare better than others with this targeting. I noticed for instance that AdSense does better on a games site than on a technology blog. I also heard people say that AdSense does quite good on product oriented blogs; say, one post solely about the iPod; another post solely about Gadget XYZ, and so on.

4. Image ads can be relevant and work for you, but they might also apall some visitors. Google's AdSense program gives you the option to choose between a couple of different ad formats. Two main groups are text ads vs text & image ads. When you choose the latter, Google will deliver what they deem works best for your content (or so one would hope, and it would be in Google's best self-interest to serve you the best possible ad, it seems).
   
   However, Google doesn't really know your layout preferences, and they don't really understand when your audience thinks ads are "too much"; and considering image ads include Flash animations (which you can't disable, once you go for image ads), Flash animations may well push some people away. One thing you can do is to only show image ads in areas where they don't disturb the content, e.g. at the end of posts. Also, you might want to listen to visitor feedback on the ads being served; I received emails before that the blinking ad on this or that site made a person want to leave the site, at which point I blocked the specific advertiser via the AdSense Setup -> Competitive Ad Filter option.

5. When it comes to context sensitive targeting, you can increase or lower the importance of certain parts of your page. To help Google find a matching ad for your content, you can use the HTML comment syntax by encapsulating more important parts with
   
   

   
   ... your important site content here ...
   .

   Or, to lower the importance of a section, use:
   
   

   
   ... your not so important site content here ...
   

   (Google notes that it may take up to 2 weeks for this change to your site will be taken into account by the AdSense.)
   
   What if your site doesn't have any good matchable content to begin with, though? Say, the page just includes an image. Well, for the reasons of search engine optimization but also ad optimization you might want to consider using at least a descriptive title, an explanatory footer containing the important keywords or keyphrases (the kind of footer that actually helps the human visitor by explaining what the page is about). In the case of image content, reasonable alt and title attribute texts should be used as well.*
   
   *Whatever you do, don't resort to "keyword-stuffing" as it doesn't help your visitors and may get your page ranked lower in search engines.

6. Be aware of risks when you change ad layouts too much. I once had a system on the server to randomly differ between various AdSense layouts on the same page. Doing so I was hoping to add some good variety to keep the ads at least somewhat interesting and notable. Shortly after I stopped doing so and simply included a rather big static area for the AdSense to "do what it wants," the AdSense revenues for that site increased. Now, I don't know if this was a coincidence of some sorts, as revenues often go down or up even when you don't do anything, but it might well have been that there was a connection between adding too much homemade randomization, and lowered revenues.
   
   At another time, during the redesign of this blog, I switched from one ad format to another for the end-of-posts AdSense ad space. This, combined with perhaps other layout changes, suddenly cut the ad revenues in half for the blog. It took me some time to realize that I had some ad channels* set up for the specific old layout size, and by changing this I must have kicked out all those advertisers who were pushing their ads through the channel.
   
   *This setting can be found at AdSense Setup -> Channels.

7. Use competing ad systems when AdSense doesn't seem to work for a site. At CoverBrowser.com, which shows galleries of comic and book covers and so on, I tried including AdSense ads in "non-annoying" places in the layout (including trying to use AdSense affiliate links via AdSense Setup -> Referrals), but this didn't seem to work at all. However I then tried "affiliating" the "buy" link below individual covers, utilizing the eBay affiliate commission system offered by AuctionAds.com*. (Disclosure: Patrick Gavin, co-owner of AuctionAds, paid me for consulting before on other projects, like Sketchcast.com.) This worked a lot better, and as it was simply connected to an existing site feature, it also didn't add clutter.
   
   A good start to find other ad programs is to search for adsense alternatives on Google... you will see a lot of lists which are dedicated to competitors. (Note that some of these competitors may be US-only.) You may also want to join an ad or blog network like The Deck, Federated Media (disclosure: I was part of Federated Media before), or 9 Rules. Before joining such a network – which might require you to show them your traffic stats and so on – check if their typical ads and campaigns fit with your site layout and your general ad type preferences.
   
   *CommissionJunction also offers an eBay affiliate system but CommissionJunction has really low usability, in my opinion; setting it up is confusing.

8. Sometimes you may get a sudden increase in traffic, hence ad clicks, but you can't locate the source of the traffic. I'm using Google Analytics to track my sites, though AdSense is also a good first indicator of traffic explosions... because it will show the combined page views of all your sites (provided you include AdSense on all of them), as opposed to Google Analytics, where you need to check site by site individually.
   
   However, sometimes even with Google Analytics, you won't be able to locate the source of your traffic because there's no specific new popular referrer being shown (a referrer is the site linking to your site, provided people click on that link). In these cases, it may well be that your site has been discussed in a TV show or similar, as the show won't "link" to you (but audiences will be entering your domain manually into the browser when they like what the saw on TV). When you feel that there has been a traffic explosion sometimes you may get additional email feedback in regards to your site, and it makes sense for you to ask your visitor: where did you first find out about the site? Maybe the can let you know about the name of the TV show, or magazine, or other "offline" source responsible for the peak. (I sometimes sent pointers to the BBC Click show for instance, with partly enormous effect.)

9. Consider using AdSense even when the page doesn't get any traffic yet. Who knows, some day the traffic suddenly explodes, and you might not realize fast enough and thus miss out on the action (as sometimes, traffic goes as fast as it comes).
   
   On the other hand, reversely I would suggest to never do a site just to make ad money with it. That kind of motivation may lead to spammy sites that don't help anyone really. (If a project is great, it's great even if it doesn't make any money.)

10. Making money with AdSense takes time. In my experience, it may take many months to years for a site to gain enough traffic to make OK money through AdSense... if ever. I have almost never experienced any site making quick and easy money with AdSense (though you may be getting quicker results than me of course, as it depends on so many variables!).
    I think for any site getting a couple of thousands of visitors a day, you might want to start playing around with AdSense to see where it takes you (if you didn't already include AdSense anyway just to see what happens, and following up on tip #9). As you are paid in US-$, the actual benefit the ad revenue will bring depends on your local costs of living as well (you might even ponder moving or going on an extended holiday trip if your local costs of living are too high for your site revenues to cover).

Valuable Adsense Tips

AdSense Tip 1: Find your keywords

Before serving ads on a web page, check its keyword density. A free and advanced tool for finding the most prominent keywords in a page can be found here: SEO Density Analyzer. Copy the most important keywords to a text file ([web page name]-adsense-keywords.txt).

AdSense Tip 2: Improve your keywords

Get keyword suggestions from Overture Search Inventory and from Google AdWords Sandbox. Get new keywords that can help you improve your ad relevance. Enter the keywords from [web page name]-adsense-keywords.txt and save the suggestions to [web page name]-adsense-suggestions.txt.

AdSense Tip 3: Keep your website focused on a theme

Use the keyword suggestions to enhance your web pages and to build theme-based content. And also try to get your keywords into the anchor text of your incoming links as much as possible. Don't forget that Google AdSense is keyword-targeted advertising: Google AdSense bases its advert topics on your websites content, this means that content-rich websites of a popular topic should attract a large amount of ads.

AdSense Tip 4: Write a new page every day

One of the best tips is to add a new page to your web site every day. The more content you have, the more visitors you will get. Put an Adsense unit on each and every content page of your site. But where? You will find more about that from the next AdSense tips.

AdSense Tip 5: Choose the right AdSense format

Wider formats are successful because the ads are compact, easy to read and are complementary to the content. The top three AdSense formats are:

1. 336x280 large rectangle
2. 300x250 medium rectangle
3. 160x600 wide skyscraper

Another successful format is the 468x15 horizontal ad links, that can be placed under your navigation bar.

AdSense tips (part 2)

In part one of the AdSense tips you found out how to improve your keywords and how to build theme-based content.

• AdSense Tip #1: Your keywords are important
• AdSense Tip #2: Improve your keywords
• AdSense Tip #3: Keep your website focused on a theme
• AdSense Tip #4: Write a new page every day
• AdSense Tip #5: Choose the right AdSense format

The next AdSense tips will show you the importance of positioning the ads and how to increase your revenue by adding multiple AdSense units.

AdSense Tip #6: Color tips

When creating your Google AdSense ads it is recommended to use the color scheme and style of your website so that the ads blend in well. Ads without background color and borders perfom better than ads within borders with background color.

Create a custom AdSense palette:

• border color = background color of your web site
• background color = background color of your web site
• link color = blue, color of your links
• url color = black, #999999
• text color = black, #333333, color of your main content

You can also rotate your color palette: select multiple color palettes that blend with your site to create variety.

AdSense Tip #7: Position tips

Visitors tend to look at the big headlines to see if your page is worth reading. If you get them interested, they will read the text and look for your navigation links.

Place the AdSense ads in a prominent place around the top/left part of your page or under your headlines, where your visitors are most likely to look at.

If you have an article page with a long body of text, the bottom of that article is a good place for AdSense ads because your visitors read the text and then they want more resources.

AdSense Tip #8: Increase the number of ads, but not too much

If you have a lot of text on a page, use multiple AdSense units. You can use up to three AdSense units on a page, two AdSense search boxes and one unit of ad links.

Link units allow the user to refine what they're interested in. So if they may not be interested in specific ads on your page, 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 visitors to search Google.com or your sites (up to 3 domains). You earn money whenever they click on the ads that come up on the search results. If you click the Open search results in a new browser window checkbox in the AdSense for Search settings, you won't lose your visitors.

AdSense Tip #9: Preview Google ads

You can find out what ads will be served by Google AdSense if you install Google AdSense Preview Tool, a very simple tool available only for Internet Explorer 6.0. Click to advertiser sites without generating invalid clicks, and easily add their URLs to your URL filter list. Because AdSense uses geo-targeting, Google serves different ads for other countries. Instead of faking your IP or travelling abroad to test your ads, use this AdSense tool to see what ads see your visitors from France, Germany or other countries.

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. Make sure you include the image in a simple html file as a link (use target="_top"). The image size should be the same as the dimension of AdSense units. In the alternate url box, enter the absolute url of the html file.

Read more about alternate ads.

AdSense Tip #10: What not to do

· 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 (e.g.: adult sites)

· Don't employ cloaking, hidden text or farm links

· Don't use AdSense ads on the same page with similar ads (e.g.: Yahoo Publisher Network)

AdSense tips (part 3)

In part one of the AdSense tips you found out how to improve your keywords and how to build theme-based content.

Then we showed you the importance of positioning the ads and how to increase your revenue by adding multiple AdSense units.

AdSense Tip #11: Show images above or next to your ads

Placing images above AdSense ads is not necessarily prohibited by program policies. However, depending on the method of implementation this could be considered encouraging users to click on ads. So 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.

AdSense Tip #12: 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 

AdSense Tip #13: 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 (for example forums) to reduce ad blindness. For example:

google_color_border = ["628098","628098","000000","000000"]; 

google_color_link = ["000000","BBB90C","BBB90C","628098"]; 

google_color_url = ["000000","628098","000000","000000"];

google_color_text = ["628098","628098","000000","000000"]; 

AdSense Tip #14: Your Google ads should be visible

Make sure your text ads are visible to the surfers in all screen formats. If you put the ads in a table, give sufficient breathing room, i.e. proper cell padding and cell spacing to make the ads stand out from the rest of your content.

AdSense Tip #15: 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.

Optimization Tips adn Tricks

Before going to a discussion about optimization on ads let me ask you a question. Do you know what is first ad unit in Adsense ads? First ad unit is the most important feature in optimization. This important feature is generally overlooked by new Adsense publishers.

The first ad unit shows the most paying ads for your site. First ad unit means which ad code you have placed first in your html code. Be careful!! First ad unit doesn't mean that ad unit which ad unit appears in top of your page.

By using channels you can easily track which ad unit is getting maximum no of clicks. If that ad unit which you have entered first has maximum CTR you need not to change it.

But if other ad unit gets maximum CTR then remove all the ad code. Then enter ad code for that unit first in your html code. Suppose your ads below content gets maximum CTR. But when you entered your ad code you placed ad code for ads on top first. In that case enter the code first for below content ads and then others.
Fore more clarification see what Adsense team member said:

This types of tips and tricks you can found in Adsense Blog written by Adsense Team members. So must make a practice to read Adsense blog when you have got time.
You will also find latest features and many other helps of Adsense there.

I don't want to say much about optimization on ad placements, ad formats and ad colors. Adsense help center has excellent tips on it. So one should must read their optimization tips for a greater clarification.Optimization tips can be found on Resource tab in your Adsense account.

Main points from their tips are:

1.Choose a wider ad format(380x280 large rectangle),(360x250 medium rectangle),(160x600 wide skyscraper)

2.Choose ad colors relating to your website color

3.Place ads where your visitors can easily see it

Adsense Tips

1. AdSense Earning = Impression-count x Click-though-rate x Cost-per-click x smart-pricing-factor.

2. Impression count is basically referring to your traffic. It means the number of times AdSense block is displayed.

3. Click-through-rate (CTR) is ratio of clicks per impressions. It can range from 0.1% to 30%, but most commonly around 1% to 10%.

4. Cost-per-click (CPC) is the earning you get per click. While traditionally it refers to the amount advertisers pay for each click, it can also mean the amount publishers get for each click.

5. Smart-pricing is AdSense method to determine how valuable clicks from your site is worth. If clicks on your site doesn’t provide good value to advertisers, e.g. from visitors’ geo-location that seldom translate to sales, you will only get a fraction of the supposed CPC.

6. Apply for AdSense account via blogger.com for faster approval.

7. Once you get your AdSense publisher code, you can put it any of your websites without requiring further approval.

8. Read and reread Google AdSense Program Policies and Terms and Conditions.

9. Don’t click on your own ads, or ask people to click, even if you are using proxies.

10. Don’t use click-bots.

11. Don’t encourage your visitors to click on ads. The only acceptable text is “Sponsored Links” and “Advertisements”.

12. Don’t put competitor contextual ads on the same page as your AdSense, for example: Yahoo Publisher Network, Clicksor. Non-contextual ads are ok.

13. Don’t put your ads on objectionable material, e.g. adult sites, gambling sites, mp3, etc.

14. Basically, don’t cheat AdSense. Google will catch you, sooner or later.

15. Viewing your on website will not get you banned. Just make sure you don’t click on the ads.

16. However, repeatedly reload your page to jack up page impressions can get you banned.

17. When in doubt don’t hesitate to contact the AdSense team. They are very helpful.

18. Choose a high paying niche without too much competition.

19. You can try highest paying keywords from adsense1020.blogspot.com, but know before-hand that you’ll face very fierce competitions.

20. Use Overture Bid Tool and Search Engine Keyword Tool to find suitable keyword.

Key Features & Benefits

Oh, the possibilites...

What can you do with the AdSense API? This all depends on your programming genius and your users' needs as AdSense publishers. Here are some possibilities:

* Let users sign up for AdSense through your site or program

* Help users generate revenue on their pages by automatically:

o Showing contextual ads targeted to your users' content.

o Placing customized AdSense for Search boxes on your users' pages.

o Implementing AdSense Referrals alongside users' content.

* Generate detailed performance reports for your users.

Remember that while the AdSense API lets you create and manage your users' AdSense accounts and tune ad settings to any of the ad formats currently supported by AdSense, it doesn't enable modifying ad sizes or format of the text.

Provide a better user experience.

Sharing revenue with your users, or allowing them to keep all of the revenue generated on their content pages, will both encourage more people to join your site and encourage your current users to generate more pages of content. Happy users are frequent users, and everyone loves to be compensated for their efforts.

The AdSense API makes it easy for your users to monetize their content with relevant advertisements without having to leave your site. This results in a simple user interface, extra revenue for users, and ultimately a better user experience.

Earn Revenue.

While helping your users to monetize their content, you can better monetize your site:

* Through the Revenue Sharing program, earn revenue when visitors click on your users' ads.

* Plus, earn Referral Bonuses when your users reach certain thresholds.

All you have to do is place the ad units and manage your pages; Google tracks performance and makes all payments to both you and your users.

Stay ahead of the competition.

Attract more customers by being one of the first companies to offer your users an integrated monetization solution for their content. You can differentiate yourself from the competition by allowing your users to show ads from the largest network of Advertisers on the internet today. The AdSense API gives users a way to make money while helping you to maintain a consistent rand experience.

How to Find a Profitable Adsense

The profitability of an Adsense niche is primarily based on the amount that Adwords advertisers are spending to compete in that niche.

Remember that an Adsense ad is only an Adwords ad that is appearing on your site and not Google. The amount that an ad generates per click is therefore directly related to the amount that Adwords advertisers are paying per click. Bottom line - if they are paying more we earn more.

So how can you find out which niches (and which keywords inside those niches) advertisers are spending more money on?

I use two different methods:

Keyword Research With Keyword Country

As you will have probably have started to gather I cannot lay enough praise on this tool. In fact I struggle to understand how I researched, chose and targeted niche sites before I got hold of it...it's that good. Aswell as being able to search by category or keyword you can also search by price range. For example, you can decide to find keywords that have an average cpc of say between $18 and $20. If you enter this price range it will return a list of keywords which fall inside that parameter - in this case - 3957 different keyword phrases.

The top 5 rated keywords in this cpc range were: "credit card", "free credit report", "mortgage rates", "consolidate debt" and "website hosting". All you need to do is go down the list work out which ones would be suitable for an Adsense monetized information site, extend your keyword research by taking your chosen phrase and entering it into the search box, build the content, integrate the Adsense and promote your new website.