The Rich Affiliate

Almost everyone has probably heard of AdSense by now, if not then I am pretty sure you have seen AdSense and may have not even known what it was. To explain AdSense, I must first tell you a little about ‘ AdWords ‘, Adwords is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising system that is available through Google the search engine. You create a small text ad, which is placed on Google’s search result pages, the ads match your websites subject or content. You bid or set a fee that you are willing to pay Google every time someone clicks on your ad, this is a great way to get highly targeted traffic that can turn into sales, subscribers, or whatever you are trying to achieve with your website traffic.

Now that I have explained Adwords, I can now tell you about AdSense. AdSense makes it possible for website owners to earn money by simply letting Google place ads on their web pages. AdSense ads can be either text or images, the ads can be altered to blend into the webpages, so they don’t make your site look junky or poorly designed. AdSense ads are highly relevant to the content of most webpages, for instance if you place AdSense ads on a webpage that sells Coins, you will get ads about selling coins or other coin related subjects. Every time a website visitor clicks on one of the AdSense ads on your webpage, you earn money, and every month after your first balance reaches one hundred dollars, Google will send you a check or you can have the money deposited into your checking account. The AdSense program is a great way to earn extra money if you have a website, it’s easy to make a few dollars every day, and some folks are making thousands of dollars per month doing it.

When I first started Adsense, I placed the ads on my webpages and it wasn’t very long until I had made a small amount of money, a few days later my account balance had grown even more. I was pretty happy, but I thought to myself, after reading a lot of articles, I am not making nearly as much money as others are making with AdSense, something must be wrong. Then I thought, maybe my website doesn’t get the traffic that the others are getting ? I chatted with a lot of people on the internet that were in the program, and I discovered that the amount of visitors I get, was higher than some of the traffic they receive. You may think that 200 – 400 unique visitors a day is low for website traffic, you are very wrong, the average website gets a lot less per day, especially if your website is only a few months old or is not optimized for the search engines, or it’s subject matter has a very low search demand.

If my website was getting a nice amount of traffic or visitors, why was my AdSense earnings so low ? The first thing that I discovered that was wrong was ‘ adsense ad placement ‘, that’s right, you have to study each webpage’s layout that you plan on placing the ads on. Wherever your webpage has sections or areas that grab and hold the visitors attention, this is a prime area to place a section of AdSense ads, in other words, place the ads on your webpages where folks will notice them. We are currently allowed to place up to 3 different AdSense ad sections or groups on each webpage. I found after some testing that the best places for my ads are, just under the title or sub-title, near the middle of the page, and near the end or bottom of my page. If you place one section of AdSense ads near the top of your webpage, folks entering your site will probably notice the ads, and if they scroll down a ways and theres more ads, that increases the odds that they will notice them also. Probably the best place to place one section of ads is at the bottom of your webpages, right after your last bit of text or interesting reading, but make sure you place the ads before any other links, because when visitors are ready to leave your site, they may leave by clicking on one of your ads, earning you money, and if you have other links showing before your ads, they may leave your site by clicking on one of them. So after I studied the layout of all my webpages, I went back through and repositioned the AdSense ads, almost immediately I noticed my earnings increased.

I left my webpages alone, and about three months later I received my first check in the mail, it wasn’t a lot of money but still for really doing no physical work I was very glad to get it. My earnings slowly started getting better and better after that first check, the next month I received another check, then the following month I got another and so on. After having been in the AdSense program for about 8 months, and chatting with more folks who were also in the program I found that my earnings were still low compared to some other people.

I then discovered another method that increased my earnings even more. I noticed that my ads stood out from the rest of my webpages text and content. I had always thought, I should make my ads a different color than my webpages background so folks would notice my ads, and click on them, I was totally wrong. Almost everyone that has been on the internet for any length of time, has become so accustomed to seeing banners and other flashy ads that almost everyone now has what is called ‘ad blindness’, that is, when they visit a site they are automatically turned off or they ignore anything that looks like an ad. I used the Adsense editor and I changed my ads background and border colors so they matched the background color of my webpages, and I changed the text color of the ads so they matched the text color of my webpages content. The ads blended in very well, to me they were barely noticeable from the rest of my webpage, but right away the number of clicks on the ads increased, and the earnings went up even more.

I left my webpages alone and for another couple months my earnings stayed about the same, I was content with the results, but my earnings were still not as good as some of the other folks who received roughly the same amount of traffic that I did. Then I found out that they had done something else to their AdSense ads, something that made the ads seem to really get peoples attention, they were placing images near the ads, it seemed adding images made the ads look unique and it helped make the amount of clicks on them rise. So I searched the internet and I found some little icons and images that matched the content of my webpages, and near where the Adsense ads were shown, I displayed the images by adding a simple html image tag. I asked google if adding the images was within the AdSense rules, and I was advised that they were fine as long as they didn’t make folks click on the ads, by this I mean, you cannot have a flashing sign that says, ‘ click these ads ‘, or you shouldn’t have a scantily dressed girl pointing to the ads saying ‘ make me happy – click here ‘ or stuff like that, just make some nice little images that pertain to your webpages content.

The next couple months or so, my earnings still continued rising slowly. By this time, besides my regular webpages I had been working on several BLOG’s pertaining to different subjects, so I thought I might as well place AdSense ads on all of my blogs also and make even more money. For a couple weeks my earnings went up quite a bit, and I was very happy, then all of a sudden, just like someone turning off a switch, my AdSense earnings plummeted. I was now making in a day, what I had made when I first joined the program, what the heck happened I thought to myself ? My traffic was still slowly rising, the number of clicks was rising, but for some strange reason, the earnings per click, (EPC) had dropped a lot, it was horrible.

Then I learned that Google had introduced a new feature or system into the AdSense program, called ‘smart pricing’, ‘smart pricing’ automatically adjusts the cost of an ad click. Using Googles system of analyzing AdSense data, if it shows that a click from one of your webpages is less likely to turn into an online sale, or other business result for the Ad publisher, the amount you earn per click in AdSense is greatly reduced. When ‘smart pricing’, was introduced, some AdSense users saw their EPC drop to as low as 3 cents a click, where before ‘smart pricing’, that same click might of earned them a dollar or much more, this was quite a drastic drop in earnings. What is horrible about ‘smart pricing’, besides the earnings loss to AdSense users, is that one site or webpage can trigger it, and once triggered by that one webpage, it effects your entire account and every webpage you have will now earn substantially less per click. Remember awhile back when I had added AdSense Ads to my BLOG’s, that seemed to be what had triggered smart pricing for me. The BLOG’s were on numerous subjects, but they were not business or real professional sites, so hardly any business results such as sales, occurred from folks clicking the ads on these sites. After I removed the Adsense ads from the BLOG’s, it took about a week, then I noticed that the EPC was once again climbing back up, yes the ‘smart pricing’, spell had been broken.

If you are thinking about trying AdSense, or if you are already in it, beware of the smart pricing curse, or if it has already effected your earnings, try removing AdSense ads from your webpages a few pages at a time, the smart-pricing system is evaluated each week, so it will take a few days to see if you have removed ads from the page(s) that triggered it.

By Robert W. Benjamin

http://www.rb59.com/software

Copyright © 2006

You may publish this article in your ezine, newsletter or on your web site as long as it is reprinted in its entirety and without modification except for formatting needs or grammar corrections.

7 tips and tricks to make your AdSense ad receive more clicks and more profit!

Find out how to deal with a few little tricks to increase your AdSense revenue dramatically … 

The First tip: – Tip #1

Use the proper framework for AdSense. Google AdSense offers you the ability to change the appearance of your AdSense display. It has been shown that AdSense without a framework bring more clicks than AdSense with a frame. Internet users have developed enough savvy to recognizes advertisements on a site immediately.

Once you have a framework for your AdSense ads it “triggers” the users to avoid clicking on the ad.

More often than not, this flags the user to simply ignore it!

An AdSense ad on your website, which has framework results in the visitors doing nothing more than ignoring your banner.

Avoid anything immediately recognized as a advertising. This is particularly true for the when there is a frame outside your text link AdSense ads. Define your settings in the configuration of the AdSense simply the border color with the same color as your site background. Thus, for example: Home White background = white AdSense framework.

The Second – Tip #2
Setting the text color and the color of the hyperlink AdSense ads The case is similar with the color of the text and the link color. If you do not want your AdSense ads to be immediately recognized by visitors. You must define the text color as well as the hyperlink color, just as your home page text and links on the homepage also appear. If that is your hyperlinks to your site are displayed in green so you define the link color in the AdSense ads with the same green color. The same applies to the AdSense text, even this should be the same color of the text.

Try using light grey for both your text and your Google Adsense ADS.

The Third  - Tip #3 What is the most efficient AdSense format for use on your home page?

This point can not be quite so easy to define, because ultimately, the AdSense format also must somehow fit into your home page. With great certainty a less efficient AdSense format is the banner 468 x 60!!

This is because this format is the standard format of banner ads, and thus immediately recognized as an advertisement by most internet users.

As mentioned above, today’s Internet users have added the banner format 468 X 60 in their memory and immediately recognize it as a banner, even if that includes text ads. Avoid if possible using this banner format in the installation of your AdSense on your site. As one of the most effective banner formats, the AdSense format 336 x 280 is proven to be more effective.

Properly configured and deployed, it is with this format on a homepage that you will see the greatest results. Most people don’t filter this out and recognize this as advertising.

The Fourth Tip –  # 4 Never build a website based soley on one niche and Adsense.
You should avoid all your Internet revenue being solely based on AdSense. Because what happens when Google internal business policy changes, or your account gets hijacked?

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

Build an Empire….?

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

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

The reality of it is, most people end up somewhere in between. Having 100 websites does indeed leave with maintenance, management and content issues. But having one website also leaves you open to all sort of fluctuations (search engines algorithm’s, market trends, etc)…..

You can adapt your plan on the way, but you’ll have an easier time if you start out going in the direction of where you want to end up.

• Would you rather start a soda vending machine business and maintain 100 vending machines everyday?

• Or would you rather work from the comfort of your home slowly growing and maintaining 100 websites?

It will take time but start with one build it and let it settle for a month or so while you continue creating niche based websites.

 You will spend a minimal amount of money and lots of time getting started but…..would you pay $200 a month for 3 months learning a business that will pay you back your initial investment for a continued period of time?

I would happily pay $2000 for a few months to learn a business that could ultimately make me $2000 per month for the rest of my life…..

 The secret that will make your AdSense revenues can double. There are ways in which your current AdSense revenue up to 100% or more can increase by a small but effective trick – even the pros use – for the design of your AdSense ads………

Well … Do I have your attention?

Tests on my websites have actually shown that this effect is not stunt his misguided and thus the turnover was substantially increase it.

Tip Fifth Tip – #5 Where should the AdSense units to be placed As mentioned above, it is most effective when the AdSense running on your home page text can be implemented.

“…..The best so that the text will flow around the AdSense and thus creates a visual layout, as would the AdSense for content on your web site belongs…..”

Tip ixth Tip – #6 Now I know how to improve my CTR but how can I improve my earnings? AdSense is one of the best tools you can use to draw dollars to your site. Remember that there is no easy way to make money on Adsense… it takes a lot of work.

“…..You can start of by blocking low paying advertisers with Filters……”

Why to loose a visitor for 0.01 cents?

 Use Overture or Google Adwords Keywords tool to discover keywords that are less popular with advertisers.

Tip #7 AdSense How many boxes can be placed on a website?

Google allows you to three ad units and one link unit per page. How many should you use?

“….Quite simply, everything you can. You are three ad units and an ad link unit. Provided of course that you have enough text on your home page, it is possible that not all units ads are filled with ads…..”

Check after a few days to see whether all the Adsense ads are relevant. You know what AdSense ads bring the most revenue in you’re niche.

“……In the Setup menu in Google AdSense, you have the possibility of using your AdSense channels units in groups to capture statistics. This provides Google with a little more focused way to know which groups AdSense better turnover and which are not as likely to be clicked….”

If you want to take things even further you can also…

• Discover what AdSense ads are clicked find the provider of the AdSense ads, or the website on which the advertisement, and find it even more possibilities and partner and sell affiliate products.

For example, if you notice that your Site visitors often ads to click on a particular topic would be also a product that you are on your site can offer, because it seems to be the case that your target audience to a need for this product.

So why not own the product offering as an affiliate and earn more margin than just a few cents with AdSense?

Some Brief History about me….

I’ve always been extremely eager to learn about all of the ways you can make money from the internet.

There are so many different ways to make money, I’ll admit that it can get very overwhelming.

But, if you boil everything down into the one “thing” that is necessary to generate money online – “it comes down to how well you can generate “targeted” traffic to your website.”

When I started online, way back in the early 2000s, I owned a aquariam supply related website.

I managed to get my website to the top of Google for the most competitive keywords in the world. Keywords like: salt water aquarium, aquarium supplies, wholesale aquarium supplies

 I put ALOT of work into getting my website to the top of Google for those keywords. Why did I spend so much time and effort to try and rank highly for those keywords?

I’ll tell you exactly why… Because I knew those keywords would send ALOT of traffic to my site. Back in the day, I thought…

Alot of traffic = Alot of sales…..!

WRONG……..

I mean, heck, common sense would tell you that the more traffic you got to your website, the more sales you would make, right?

WRONG … Back then, I, like most other people, thought that’s the way it all worked, or I obviously wouldn’t have spent to much time and effort on those keywords.

Let me explain….

While I did have #1 rankings for nearly every single major keyword related to the aquarium supplies industry and it was bringing in over 10,000 visitors to my dinky little website PER DAY, the conversion rate (i.e. the amount of sales I made per visitor) was ridiculously low.

I sold roughly 1 product for every 1,000 people that came to my site.

That’s a .1% conversion rate. You heard me right, “point one percent”.

If you don’t know what a good conversion rate is, let me just say that you should never have below a 1 percent conversion rate, let alone a .1 percent. Getting 1,000 visitors to your site per day takes a heck of a lot of work….

“…..If I had to do it all over again, I would NOT spend my time on such broad, competitive keyword phrases like: weight loss. … only to have such a poor visitor value and very little return for my time and effort…..”

I would spend my time ranking for, bidding on, and basing my entire business on keywords that are already 100% proven to convert visitors into buyers….

Because, let’s face it, we want people to come to our website and BUY our stuff. We don’t want people visiting our site if they’re just going to leave, right….?

There are two major problems that online marketers have, and they are:

They focus on extremely broad keywords that just bring a lot of random traffic to their websites. They don’t know how to properly research their market to find which people are buying what they’re selling.

Because you’ve read up to this point, problem #1 should no longer be a sticking point for you. It can lead to a lot of extra work, with very little results.

“……In fact, in my case, it was downright depressing to have 10,000 daily visitors, only to make 10 sales a day. I had imagined that when the day came that I had 10,000 daily visitors, I’d be sitting on the beach somewhere, sipping margaritas and that obviously didn’t happen….”

So, at this point, the only problem that remains is not knowing how to properly research a market or niche, to find exactly which people are buying what you’re selling.

Well, guess what……?

Even though it took me 3 years of my life to come to grips that in order to make a heck of a lot of money on the internet, you absolutely have to focus on very specific, targeted keywords…

I finally learned, and because of this, I’ve been able to help thousands of other achieve the type of online success I’ve been fortunate enough to have. 

I want you to visit my website for more tips. l show you exactly which keywords you should focus on, to literally triple or more, the amount of money you make from your online business.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to benefit both businesses and affiliate marketers. The programs allow business to reach a wider base of customers and provide a valuable source of online income for individual marketers. One key to becoming a successful affiliate is to join an affiliate forum and learn from your peers. If you want to become a successful affiliate, the following five strategies can also help you improve your chances of success

1. Choose a Niche Market

Successful affiliates understand the importance of niche markets. Too many affiliate marketers focus on the same products, offering anything and everything they can. Research has demonstrated the customers actually buy more when they are offered fewer choices. The key to succeeding in affiliate marketing is to choose a specific niche market and then aggressively targeting this area. Consolidate your efforts by focusing your energy on promoting and selling a specific product or service.

2. Focus on Search Engine Marketing

Once you’ve chosen your niche, you will need to effectively advertise and promote your affiliate business. Search engine marketing is one of the most effective ways to draw in customers to your website. Search engine marketing, often referred to as SEM, involves using search engines to advertise your product or service. This can be achieved by optimizing web pages to produce organic results through top listings in the major search engines. Another option is to try and advertising program such as Google AdWords or Overture to purchase targeted ads on related websites.

3. Know Your Audience

The key to becoming a successful affiliate is to know the audience you are targeting. Pay attention to your website metrics reports to discover where your viewers are coming from, what they are searching for, and the products they are most interested in. Also take note of comments and feedback you receive from site visitors. This information can help you determine the direction of future sales items, website content, and promotional strategies.

Once you know a bit about your audience, it is important to invest some energy into becoming a resource for these visitors. Create content that appeals to your readers. This might include informational articles, interactive content, quizzes, polls, and forums. These resources allow you to create a connection with viewers and establish your credibility as a valued online merchant.

4. Diversify Your Affiliate Strategy

When it comes to affiliate marketing, the old saying holds true: Never place all of your eggs in one basket. The ever-changing online marketplace can lead to dramatic shifts in monthly sales or website traffic. You can protect yourself from this uncertainty by selling products from several different businesses. When problems arise, such as problems with affiliate links or a failure to pay commissions, you will still have the income from your other affiliate programs to fall back on.

5. Experiment with Promotional Strategies

Never be afraid to try new techniques when promoting your affiliate business. If you have been focusing most of your effort on search engine marketing, consider spending some time on other methods, such as e-mail marketing, weekly newsletters, or cross-linking campaigns. Successful affiliates are able to adapt quickly and learn from other thriving businesses. By using these five strategies and keeping your eye out for new techniques, you will be on your way to becoming a successful affiliate.

Discuss these strategies and several others in one of the busiest affiliate forums in the world. Join our affiliate community today at AffiliateMP.com