Google Adsense College

How to earn a steady stream of income — with little work! — using Google AdSense affiliate programs

Do you have your own website? Want an extra source of income? If the answer is “yes” to either of these questions, you may want to check out Google AdSense affiliate programs (www.google.com/adsense). With AdSense, you earn money by displaying small Google text ads on your website. Whenever one of visitors clicks on one, you earn a small fee. You won’t necessarily make scads of money with Google AdSense; however, once you’re up and running, you can enjoy a steady extra stream of profits — without doing any extra work! Google AdSense is NOT for everyone, however. Can YOU make money with Google AdSense? AdSense may be right for you if…

• You have a content-rich web site with lots of pages containing information on specific topics. Ads relating to your web page content will be displayed, so visitors searching for information that you offer should be interested in the products or services these ads offer.That greatly increases the chances that people will click the ads — and make you some extra cash!
• Your website contains content related to “big-ticket” items like holidays or electronic goods. These items attract higher bids from advertisers for the relevant keywords that generate the ads.

  And, as the AdSense publisher, you receive a percentage of the bid amount — so the higher the better from your point of view!

• You run a content-rich non-commercial blog. The search engines LOVE the fresh, relevant content that blogs produce. And the more people who can find your site, the greater number of click-throughs you’ll receive.

  Many blogs successfully make money with Google AdSense to cover their hosting fees and other overhead costs.

• You don’t want to spend time looking for advertisers. Finding paying advertisers can be difficult, time-consuming, and ultimately not very lucrative, unless you have a site with VERY high volumes of suitable traffic.But if you want to test third-party advertising on your web site, AdSense takes away the need to try to find suitable advertisers — freeing you to work on other areas of your web business, like developing new products.

You may want to give Google AdSense affiliate programs a skip if…

• You sell a product with a lot of competitors. Although AdSense allows you to block up to 200 of your competitors’ URLs, you still run the risk of their ads showing up on your site.

  Obviously, advertising competing sites on your own site is not the best business strategy, and it’s crucial that you assess how much of a risk this would be for your business.

• You sell products and services through your website, and you don’t want potential customers to be distracted from your sales messages. AdSense ads could affect your sales, depending on their placement (on sales pages, order forms, etc).
• You already have loyal advertisers. Displaying AdSense ads on your site can upset your current advertisers — especially if their revenue is affected as a result.
  So you need to consider the risk of upsetting them and possibly losing a steady stream of income.

That said, Google AdSense affiliate programs are relatively simple ways to create extra streams of income for little work. (Read more free tips on making money online with Google AdSense.)

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Tags: AdSense Programs

I’ve been spending some time recently optimising the advertising here on Modern Life, and I’ve been trying a number of approaches to increase earnings while maximising user experience. It’s a tricky balancing act, as effective ads are generally more obtrusive ones. Is there an effective way to keep both effective adverts and happy users?

Optimising ad positions

I’m currently experimenting with a couple of bolder and more intelligent techniques, but one of the more drastic changes is the location of the primary AdSense unit - employing a ‘Medium Rectangle’ unit in the hottest spot (as per the Google AdSense heat map), in a very prominent top-left location. The previous position - a leaderboard type, across the top of the page, was visible but less engaging than the rectangular formats. Video ad support is also lacking in the banner-style formats.

Referral ad switching

Turning off ad display for certain referring URLs can seem counter-intuitive, but can help to preserve CPM and help increase popularity on social media sites. Currently I’ve disabled ad display for inbound traffic from Digg and Reddit. Doing so helps chances of promotion on such sites (although the change is small), as advertising can be seen as ’spammy’ - and the audience on such sites tend to be very non-clicky, so in essence the non-display of ads helps preserve a more consistent CTR.

Time-delayed display

In order to reward regular readers, and as not to put off new readers, new articles have no AdSense units whatsoever - after a week elapses, the ads automatically appear. While this may seem like a counterintuitive way to reduce ad income on the potentially more popular, newer articles, in reality most ad income is preserved. Organic traffic (from the search engines) tends to perform far better than referral-based or direct traffic, so it’s the archives that generate most of the ad income.

Removing ads from the new articles preserve the user experience whilst not making much of a dent in the bottom line. By the time the article is indexed in Google, the ads will start to appear. In essence, the organic traffic to the post archives sustains the site, while the new articles drive readership and encourage users to subscribe.

Full RSS content

One thing that I haven’t changed, although I feel is relevant to this post, is the provision of full content via RSS. Some webmasters are wary of offering their full content via RSS in an effort to preserve ad income - don’t be. In terms of pushing new content and building readership, the benefits are far-reaching with full feeds, and dwarf any possible detriment.

The best way to build a site’s popularity is to treat your readers well - but that doesn’t necessarily mean losing out on potential ad income.

Tags: AdSense Experience, AdSense map

This morning I noticed a strange phenomena. Every hour or less, one of a bunch of random IPs shows up at the site, loads a random forum page, then does a site search for “Female Impotence”, then vanishes. As a consequence, our cloud of “most popular searches” started to include the phrase - hardly a subject our average visitor cares about. The inclusion of this search phrase in our “most popular” prompted my investigation.

The range of IPs involved in this search is wide and random - over 156 distinct IPs so far. Most but not all of them are from overseas. Brazil, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Russia, Japan.

The user agents they use are variable, they are basically a typical zoo of internet explorer windows browsers.

The puzzle is that there is no direct value in getting into our cloud of “most popular searches”. It surfaces no external link. It results in no matches on the site itself. It provides no page rank boost.

So what could be the incentive?

One possibility is that the pharma industry has kicked off a skunk works campaign to create a new market for product that needs one. this article at the BBC dating from 2003 mentions a report in the UK that pharma is trying to build the market for a new “disease” that of course needs expensive pills. I am cynical enough to want that to be the explanation. But “google trends” doesn’t show the search term on their radar at all.

This blog post says that the phrase is in the top 50 most highly sought after (highly paid) adsense hits.

Then.. the penny dropped. This must be click-fraud. If adverts for pills pay $10 a click, and there were over 250 fetches of the search results for ‘female impotence’, which in turn requests a search block from google, and in turn an advert is clicked, then someone somewhere is out of pocket $2500 from just the hits on our site alone. If these browsers were engaged in 100 other site-based searches they could have racked up a quarter of a million bucks over the last 15 days. And I suppose we’ve been overpaid as well.

I have reported it to google. I have no financial incentive to do so: somehow I doubt I’d have seen a reversal of payments if I didn’t report it. In our history of using adsense the daily clicks and payments results in a check later on, with minimal if any deductions. Are their click-fraud systems so sensitive they avoid charge-backs even intra day?

Either way, I doubt this is the very first time we’ve been an unwitting participant in a click-fraud campaign.

Update: It occurred to me that it isn’t obvious who gains from this click-fraud. The answer is that it is likely to be reverse click-fraud. If you are competing for adsense placement and can’t out-bid a competitor you can just spend her into the ground instead. Aim a botnet at her adverts across a range of sites and either google will cancel the ads due to click fraud or (more likely) they will exceed their budget and the ads will disappear and your (cheaper) ads will appear in their place. Nasty business.

Tags: Adsense Click，Google Click

Saying “I told you so” often smacks of smugness, but it appears we were right about Google’s decision to make the AdSense for Feeds migration a manual process.

Google will soon provide a self-service process to migrate from an account on the original FeedBurner website to a Google Account. We have temporarily paused processing of new manual migration requests; we are working doggedly through the initial queue of requests and will re-open account migration services as soon as the first batch is completed.

(If you have already submitted a migration request, please look for an email response from Google once your migration has completed).

Tags: FeedBurner

I noticed a new option in my AdSense account: AdSense for feeds, a program that displays contextual and placement-targeted ads in FeedBurner feeds. FeedBurner announced in May that AdSense for Feeds will be available to a small number of publishers and now it seems that everyone can use it.

FeedBurner has recently closed FAN, its advertising network. “No new applications for FAN publishers are being accepted and we expect the broad variety of options provided through AdSense (including the new AdSense for Feeds product, powered with FeedBurner feeds) will give publishers valuable new revenue-earning potential,” says a FeedBurner/Google employee.

The new AdSense for Feeds option lets you create a new ad unit that has a format automatically selected from 468×60 and 300×250. “Generally, the 300×250 size will display when there’s more content and when your feed is being viewed in a device with a larger display,” explains Google. You can choose if you want image ads, the ad frequency, the position (top or bottom of the post), the colors and a channel that tracks the ad performance.

For the moment, there’s no connection between your AdSense account and the FeedBurner account, so Google automatically adds the FeedBurner service to your AdSense account. Unfortunately, your feeds are still connected to the old FeedBurner account and you need to migrate them first. The migration process is manual: just send an email at adsense-support-aff@google.com and mention your FeedBurner username and the AdSense account email address.

From AdSense, you can easily burn a new feed by entering the address of your blog and selecting some tracking options. The feeds can be managed at the new FeedBurner site, but there’s no visible change other than the integration with Google Accounts and the new URLs for feeds: http://feedproxy.google.com/NAME.

Here’s an ad from a feed of a FeedBurner/Google employee:

I doubt that these ads are an effective way to monetize feeds, since people use feed readers to get timely updates from a lot of sites and spend less time for each item. Besides, feed readers are mostly used by tech-savvy readers that are less likely to click on ads.

At some point, I may experiment with some infrequent ads in Google Operating System’s feed and I’ll post my findings.

Tags: Feeds, Launches

Have you ever tried to insert the Google Adsense code directly into your Blogger XML Template and get this error?

Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly. XML error message: The processing instruction target matching “[xX][mM][lL]” is not allowed.

So, you resolve to insert the Adsense code using blogger widgets. However that means your widgets can not appear within each post, the best spots to place your ads. Don’t worry, there is a way of inserting Adsense code straight into your XML templates.

Since Blogger started using XML everything is more strict and standardized. The above error simply mean the Adsense code is not standized XML and solve it we need to replace all the html character such as ‘<’ with ‘&gt;’ ‘”‘ with ‘&quot;’. For example:

Quote:

<script type=”text/javascript“><!–
google_ad_client = “pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”;
google_ad_width = 336;
google_ad_height = 280;
google_ad_format = “336×280_as”;
google_ad_type = “text_image”;
google_ad_channel = “”;
google_color_border = “FFFFFF”;
google_color_bg = “FFFFFF”;
google_color_link = “000000″;
google_color_text = “000000″;
google_color_url = “000000″;
//–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>

would be

Quote:

&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;&gt;&lt;!–
google_ad_client = &quot;pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&quot;;
google_ad_width = 336;
google_ad_height = 280;
google_ad_format = &quot;336×280_as&quot;;
google_ad_type = &quot;text_image&quot;;
google_ad_channel = &quot;&quot;;
google_color_border = &quot;FFFFFF&quot;;
google_color_bg = &quot;FFFFFF&quot;;
google_color_link = &quot;000000&quot;;
google_color_text = &quot;000000&quot;;
google_color_url = &quot;000000&quot;;
//–&gt;&lt;/script&gt;
&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;
src=&quot;http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js&quot;&gt;
&lt;/script&gt;

You can use your text editor to replace all the HTML, but Blogcrowds also has an HTML parsed that takes care of everything for you. Now with the code you can paste it anywhere in your HTML code with no error at all.

Here are some tips for where in the XML Template you should paste the parsed HTML code. I used a barebone Minima template so it should be similar in all templates. Find the normal text and then add the bolded code are added by me:

1)Next To The Post

<div style=”float:left;”>
<!–parsed Adsense code–>
</div>

<div class=’post-body’>
<p><data:post.body/></p>
<div style=’clear: both;’/> <!– clear for photos floats –>
</div>

2)After Post Before Credits

<div class=’post-body’>
<p><data:post.body/></p>
<div style=’clear: both;’/> <!– clear for photos floats –>
</div>

<div><!–parsed Adsense code–></div>

<div class=’post-footer’>
<p class=’post-footer-line post-footer-line-1′>
<span class=’post-author’>
<b:if cond=’data:top.showAuthor’>
<data:top.authorLabel/> <data:post.author/>

3)After Credits

Tags: Adsense Blogger XML

Because Google Adsense refuses to explain in detail, exactly how my account was in violation of their terms and conditions, I decided to remove the google adsense code from all of my blogs, and I sent the following email to them:

Please cancel my Google Adsense account, effective immediately.

Due to the fact that I have been notified my account has “violated the program’s Terms and Conditions”, yet no one seems to be up front enough to tell me HOW this happened.

It’s nice to know that my account is in “violation” because “We cannot disclose any details about how our monitoring technology works or what specifics we found on your account”.

I see no need to continue offering adsense ads on my site, when i cannot trust anyone to be straight with me.

To which, they replied just moments ago:

Hello Michael,

Thanks for your email. If you’d like to close your Google AdSense account, there are two options available to you.

1. You can permanently close your AdSense account. If you close your account, you’ll no longer have access to the Google code and you’ll receive no further emails from us. Your remaining earnings will be paid out according to the payment schedule outlined in the AdSense Terms and Conditions (https://www.google.com/adsense/terms), provided there are no holds on your account.

2. You can temporarily suspend your participation in AdSense by removing the Google code from your site. Your account will remain active, and you can replace the Google code at any time in the future.

If you’d like to permanently close your AdSense account, please reply to this email and we’ll process your request.

For additional questions, I’d encourage you to visit the AdSense Help Center (http://www.google.com/adsense_help), our complete resource center for all AdSense topics. Alternatively, feel free to post your question on the forum just for AdSense publishers: the AdSense Help Group (http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help).

Sincerely,

Andrew
The Google AdSense Team

One of the ways to “close” your account is to remove the ads from your site? HAHAHA. Fat chance, bucko! This simply translates into removing all ads from your site and allowing Google to hold on to any money that you may have earned, indefinitely.

I don’t think so.

Google Adsense has repeatedly failed to tell me exactly how my account was in violation of their terms and conditions, and they have not been upfront with me. How can they expect me, or anyone else, to correct the issue if they won’t tell me what’s causing the issue in the first place? All it would have taken was an explanation of some sort, that told me what the problem was. (Remember, I have only had 37 adsense clicks since the first of the month).

Either way, at this point, I am done with them.

I have already replaced all of their ads on all of my sites, and I have no intention of ever putting their ads back on my sites. Ever.

So I sent the following email:

Hi Andrew,

Because no one has answered exactly HOW my account was in violation of the terms and conditions (ie: told me what service the emails are referring too), I would indeed like to permanently close my Adsense account. I see no reason to keep it open if I am constantly going to be found in violation, yet not told in detail, WHY or HOW or WHO was causing the violation.

Thank you,

Michael.

Of course, I will get a response telling me my account has been terminated, and they will fail once again to answer any questions I might have asked in the numerous emails over the past two days. I can only wonder if I will ever see my money though.

Apparently I am not the only one this is happening to.

This guy at This Circus I Call My Life was a penny away from getting his payout. He references Blog Explosion as well. He also references even more people who have all had issues with Adsense.

Tags: Adsense Follow Up

In association with Google, dotnetspider.com has introduced ‘AdSense Revenue Sharing Program’. AdSense  revenue sharing program allow you to earn revenue for the content you contribute in this site.

We are displaying Google AdSense advertisements in most of our pages. These advertisements are provided by Google. In case of pages which contain content contributed by members, we are sharing 90% of the Google AdSense revenue to the contributing member. You can earn AdSense revenue by posting .NET resources, code snippets, articles etc. Actively participating in the discussion forum and inviting your friends are some of the other ways to earn revenue from Google AdSense revenue sharing program.

The AdSense revenue tracking and payment transactions are handled directly by Google, which ensures that you are participating in a genuine revenue sharing program. You must submit an application to Google through this site and your participation is subject to approval by Google.

Tags: AdSense revenue, AdSense Sharing

A few days ago I tried putting Google AdSense ads on my site again, and I quickly realized that it would be an easy way to cover the hosting costs in the future and still get a good amount money over every month. The same day, a few hours after I added the ads, a website visitor e-mailed me through my contact form and told me that many of the AdSense links led to completely unrelated sites which contained nothing but new AdSense links. A few examples were listed, and it looked really bad. The e-mail suggested that I would review the ad links and then use the competitive filter to remove them, because they are not only fooling Google of money - they are crap in every other way as well. I thought that it was a good idea, so I followed the instructions in the e-mail without realizing that it would cause trouble…

I logged in to my AdSense account to make it make it obvious that the clicks were my own so they wouldn’t be counted, and then I went through the different pages of my site and clicked the links. Many advertising sites were really interesting, and I even signed up at some of them just to get more information about products that appeared to be interesting. But I also got a big list of completely crappy ad-sites which would soon be filtered out to give room for real advertisers. Everything looked great. But a few days after I had reviewed the advertisers, Google closed my AdSense account because of “invalid clicking activities”, refering to a limitation in the terms that says that a site owner may not click any of the links on his own site - which I of course knew very well. And they did this without giving me any kind of warning or any chance to explain myself, which is something I find incredibly stupid and extremely disrespectful. It feels like a personal insult to be pointed out as a cheater when my intention was to secure the quality of the ads on my site. And the fact that Google will also keep the $250 that I had earned this month (with the day I clicked my links excluded) makes it even more stupid!

I realize now that the e-mail I got was an ugly trap, a form of economical sabotage that I should have discovered and not paid any attention to. But like all good traps, it made perfect sense in every way - until it was too late. I made a big bummer, no doubt about that. But I’m sure that I’m not the only person who has been tricked this way, and since I think that I don’t deserve to be completely kicked out because of this I have sent an e-mail to the AdSense support at Google, telling them that I can explain every single click I made that day. I have formally requested to get the account opened again, or that I should atleast get the money that I have earned paid out to me (except for the amount made at the day of my clicks of course). It would make most sense to me, really.

I have always seen Google as good-guys that actually care for their users (unlike many other major companies) so it will be very interesting to see if they care about this at all or if they have grown too big to listen to a single user. Depending on their move now, I will either become an even greater fan of Google - or I will lose all respect for a company that I have admired for so many years.

I will find out soon, and I will make sure to let you know what happens.

Tags: AdSense trap

Adsense and YPN (Yahoo Publishers Network) allow web site publishers with content-centric web sites to add a substantial revenue stream to their site by adding contextual advertising, which can generate revenue anywhere from a few pennies a day to thousands of dollars per month.

The formula for success in the Adsense and YPN programs is fairly simple.

(# of Visitors) X (Clickthru %) X (Ad Value) = Income

Tags: Adsense YPN