Are you seeing the following error message when trying to log in? “Welcome! You’re signed in to Google Accounts under the email [your email address] and your Google Account password, but this is not a valid AdSense login.”We’ve heard that there’s been confusion among publishers about this login error message — especially if you’re absolutely positive that you’ve used the correct email address when logging in. (And 99.9% of the time, this is the case.) To help you access your account, we’d like to provide you with some clarification and tips for troubleshooting.If you’re seeing this error message, this means your AdSense account shares the same login and password as a Google Account, but the two accounts are not linked. As a result, when you try logging in at www.google.com/adsense, our system will only grant you access to your Google Account — not your AdSense account. To resolve this issue, you’ll need to maintain two separate passwords. The easiest way to proceed is to first ensure that you’re logged out of Google Accounts for any other products you use, such as Gmail or AdWords. Then, change your AdSense password at https://www.google.com/adsense/assistlogin. You’ll be asked to submit your login email address to us, and we’ll then send a reset link to that address. When changing your AdSense password, please be sure to select a unique password that you’re not using with any other Google product. After you’ve changed your AdSense password, please try logging in again at www.google.com/adsense.We understand that this is inconvenient, and we apologize for the confusing situation. We’re working on migrating all AdSense accounts over to Google Accounts, and in the meantime, we appreciate your patience.Posted by Arlene Lee – AdSense Publisher Support
Pinning it down (to $10)
As part of our efforts to make sure that the AdSense account details publishers provide are valid and correct, we do a couple types of validation that you may be aware of: the Personal Identification Number (PIN) program and, in some locations, phone number verification. One or both of these verification methods is required in order to ensure the security and accuracy of your information so you can receive payments from AdSense.In the past, our system would ask you to verify your information when your earnings reached $50. However, we’ve recently changed the threshold to $10. This lowered amount means many of you may see a PIN arrive in your mailbox soon, as well as a prompt in your account to verify your phone number. For more information about these holds, visit the links in the ‘Required Actions’ box on your Payment History page.
(Psst: If your all-time earnings are between $10 and $50, this might be a good time to learn all about PINs so you’ll know what to expect. Or, if you prefer surprises, you can remain blissfully ignorant till a PIN mailer pops up in your mailbox. Just be sure you don’t pitch it in the trash!)Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support
What Happened to Adsense Referral Code?
I was looking through my Adsense account today intending to put the referral badge at my blog when I realized the only Google Referral options that were available were only the “Adwords” and the “Download the Google Toolbar with Firefox” codes or something like that.Is there no more referral bonus for referring people to Adsense? Did I miss out on a newsletter or something?Someone please let me know!!! Thanks in advance :-)Cheerio…
AdSense in fashion for those who wear many hats
Here’s another AdSense Story Contest submission, this time from internet entrepreneur Shawn Collins of New Jersey. Shawn has been an affiliate marketer since 1997, and joined AdSense in 2003 after he found it to be a natural extension for monetizing his websites. He wears a lot of different hats as an Internet marketer — not only is Shawn the co-founder of the Affiliate Summit conference, but he also runs the Affiliate Buyer’s Guide and is an affiliate himself.Before AdSense, Shawn relied on running affiliate ads and selling space on a CPM basis. This could be hit or miss, as he would manually try to place ads that were the best fit. As his sites grew, he would sometimes forget about a time-sensitive ad, and that ad slot would become wasted space. “With the contextually served ads from AdSense,” Shawn says, “my advertising is always fresh and spot on.”Shawn also blogs daily about affiliate marketing and maintains an affiliate manager resource site. His audience is savvy, since they’re internet marketers as well, so he considers it essential that targeted, relevant advertising is served up to his visitors. According to Shawn, “AdSense is an ideal solution for my varied web properties, and I work with AdSense for content, AdSense for search, referrals, and video units.”As Shawn mentions in his video, one of the highlights of his day (sometimes many times a day) is when he logs in to his AdSense account. He likens it to holding a lottery ticket as he waits for his daily earnings to be revealed. “I try to guess the daily total, based on my past performance, which makes the whole process a little more fun. When I experiment with new placements or have a particularly good day with my traffic, it’s always a thrill to see my milestones measured in AdSense commission spikes.”Posted by Ryan Hayward - AdSense Product Marketing
This is not A Porn Site!
My goodness, the SERP’s gone crazy I guess but it’s doing me good! This make money blog has been receiving quite an amount of hits from searches like “watch me bang my wife”, “bang wife”, “bang lady”. As if this is a porn site where you can find sexy photos of naked women. I only made mention of “Watch me bang my wife” in my post about the adsense ads appearing in my other blog. But that was just it. I’ve never mentioned about sexy girls or anything related to s3x! Could the search engines mistakenly thought of this blog as porn? Hilarious but advantageous on my part.Here’s precisely why! A lot of horny people look for porn sites that’s primarily why erotic sites get thousands of visitors a day regardless of the promotions. You could experiment about it. Start a sexy blog, do a little promotion then just sit back and relax and wait for traffic to come rushing in. You could be getting more visitors than a year old blog is getting on a daily basis. Nudity sells offline and online! Just don’t put adsense ads on that kind of site or google will ban you for good! Adsense is really strict now about where publishers put adsense codes. So better be careful.Anyway, the point is, anything related to nudity caters to a lot of people worldwide. Just look at where my blog gets traffic! It’s amazing to snatch a considerable amount of traffic away from the real porn sites and into this blog about money making. The downside though is that advertisements relating to sexy women, or porn sites pay really low but if you get 30 clicks to these ads you can increase your average daily adsense earnings pretty quick.I remember a fellow blogger who made mentioned of “naruto porn videos” and almost instantly he got a good traffic from the search engines looking for naruto videos. It really doens’t hurt to play with keywords at times and see how your blogs will rank in the SERP. Incorporating keywords in your posts might just give you the traffic you’ve been wishing to get and the money of course!
Hebrew AdSense Help Forum launched
We’re all about numbers and international launches this week, so we’re excited to tell you that we’ve recently launched our (sweet) 16th AdSense Help Forum, this time in Hebrew. If you’re a Hebrew-speaking publisher, visit the new forum to ask your questions about the AdSense program or share your advice with other publishers. You may also see occasional posts from a Google representative nicknamed AdSensePro.With the ever-growing number of forums in a wide variety of languages, now’s a great time to join the AdSense community in your language! Our forums are also available in Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support
Inside AdSense, now in Russian
We’ve just brought the number of AdSense blogs to an even dozen with the launch of our latest one — Inside AdSense: Официальный блог Google AdSense. If you’re a Russian-speaking publisher, you can rely on this blog for information about the latest AdSense news and feature releases in your own language. We also hope you’ll find it to be a useful resource for optimizing your sites and making the most out of your AdSense account. Our Russian support team will address frequently-asked questions among Russian-speaking publishers, and share local case studies with you.Ðе забудьте подпиÑатьÑÑ Ð½Ð° раÑÑылку, чтобы получать поÑледние новоÑти на ваш email!Posted by Pavels Kilivniks - Russian AdSense blog team
Summary of New Changes to AdSense Referrals Programs
My last post love letter to AdSense shared some of the latest news to come out of AdSense regarding their referrals program - but there are more changes announced. Let me share them here:
All publishers may now participate in AdSense referrals regardless of their own location. Now you’ll only earn commission if those you refer come from North America, Latin America and Japan.
The commission paid will be $100 when the publisher you refer makes $100 in their first 180 days (there is no more $5 or $250 payments and no more $2000 bonus)
There have been some publishers who can’t see any referral earnings in their reports - this is a glitch and will be fixed
Publishers using the ‘Google Pack’ referral program will only earn $1 per referral (previously it was $2) as of the third week of February
Publishers using the Firefox referrals program to China will see reductions in payments (this won’t impact anyone you refer who is from outside of China).
Dear AdSense, You Heard My Pleas - Another Open Letter to AdSense
Earlier in the week AdSense confirmed that they would no longer accept publishers into their AdSense referral system (the program where they earn commissions by recommending AdSense) that lived outside of North America, Latin America or Japan. I (and other bloggers) wrote expressing our disappointment and pointing out problems with this post.
Today AdSense have announced that they’ve re-thought their approach and will now allow all publishers to participate - but will only pay commissions based upon the location of the publishers that they refer.
While this will still mean a reduction in commissions for those referring AdSense new publishers - it seems a more logical decision to me.
As I previously wrote an open letter about my ‘broken heart’ over their last decision - I thought I’d send them another today.
Dearest AdSense,
When I wrote to you to tell you of the way that you broke my heart earlier in the week I must admit that I thought my cries of despair might fall on deaf ears and that you’d toss my note aside. I know how much correspondence from lovers (and ex-lovers) you must get.
Yet yesterday when you called to say that you got my note and that my declaration of love for you had caused you to rethink your decision…. my heart did leap with joy.
Today you’ve posted a note of your own - on your blog. You say that you’ve rethought your decision to end your affair with those of us who live outside of your backyard and that you’ll continue to accept (and reward) some of the gifts of traffic that we send to you.
Instead of rejecting the advances of lovers based upon their location - you’ll look at the quality of the gifts (traffic) that we send and make a call on whether we’ll be rewarded based upon that.
While I’m still sad to know that not all of my gifts are valuable in your eyes - this change of heart is one that makes a little more sense to me and I respect that you’ve been willing to rethink the relationship that we have.
With Valentines Day approaching hopefully our gifts to one another will continue to bring happiness to all.
Thank you
Darren Rowse
ProBlogger.net
A follow-up to our referrals announcement
You may have seen our recent post about the upcoming changes to referrals promoting AdSense. Since we made this announcement, we’ve received a number of responses about the program being dependent on the location of the referring publisher. We’ve carefully considered your feedback, and have decided to modify the original plan.The changes to referrals promoting AdSense will now depend on where your users are located, regardless of your location as a publisher. You’ll earn $100 for every user you refer to AdSense who is located in North America, Latin America or Japan when they generate $100 in AdSense revenue within 180 days and they remove all payment holds. You’ll no longer be paid for users you refer who are located elsewhere. These changes will go into effect the last week of January.The option to add a referral unit for AdSense will reappear in your account when you target any referral unit to Japan and/or any countries in North America and Latin America. To ensure payment for valid conversions, we recommend that you check the targeting settings on your current AdSense referral units.
We’ve also heard from a number of you that you’re no longer seeing recent AdSense referral earnings in your account. Please be assured that this is a display error — past conversions have not been removed from your account. Our engineers are working hard to resolve this issue quickly.Finally, we’d like to let you know about upcoming changes to the referrals programs for Google Pack and Firefox: Google Pack: Currently, you can earn up to $2 when a user downloads and runs Google Pack for the first time after being referred through your link or button. Starting the third week of February, each successful Pack referral will earn up to $1. This change will apply to all referrals for Google Pack and is independent of user location or publisher location. Firefox: We’ll also be reducing payments for Firefox referrals from China during the third week of February. This specific referral payment change will only affect installations from users in China. Again, this is independent of your location as a publisher. We understand that these changes may decrease revenue for some of you currently participating in these referrals programs. While it’s our goal to help publishers earn as much as possible with the AdSense program, like any other referrals advertiser, we’re constantly evaluating our campaigns to make them effective and sustainable.Again, thank you for your feedback and support of the referrals program.Posted by Talia Brodecki - AdSense Product Marketing
Is Money the Root of All Evil? (Writing with Purpose) - SendMeRSS
Is Money the Root of All Evil? (Writing with Purpose)
I have been writing in this blog for just about a year, and I have been through a number of changes:
The blog was once on a subdomain of my company, and now has its own domain. I started at infrequent posts, then went to 2-3 posts a week, and now am at 5-6 posts per week. The topics have changed as my voice has developed and my experience has grown.
I have thought a long time about what the purpose of my writing really is. It does not build my client list, so it’s not for promoting my business. (Although, in all fairness, I rarely promote myself on this site.) It hasn’t produced income for me. It hasn’t opened up new job opportunities. It has introduced me to a lot of really wonderful people that I have been glad to message back and forth with. It has helped me sort thoughts in my head and put them into words in a more focused way. Being responsible for posts on a regular schedule and extras such as the Carnival of the Capitalists has made my writing production more disciplined. So I guess you could say that blogging has been more of a writing exercise or a hobby for me for the past year, rather than an actual job.
This is where I got to the point of advertising. I have been debating advertising for a long time, and the debate had taken a new intensity since rebranding the site on its own. While having additional income for my efforts would be nice, there are many cons to putting ads on my site.
Advertising is a Distraction
Unlike linking to more content which would provide value to my readers, advertisements just take them to a place where they will be sold something. I suppose if these things are of value to them (what small business owner doesn’t need supplies or a computer or search engine services?), then that is not too bad.
Blogging is about Trust
For me, placing ads on my site would require very strict control over the content. I couldn’t use a program like AdSense because with small business content, those scammy work at home ads were bound to pop up. The only way I would feel comfortable hosting advertisers is if I had a strict system for selecting exactly which ads and offers would appear on my site. I would then not have to worry about the trust I have built being destroyed by unscrupulous advertisers. I would not accept things like link-buying or paid content, because without transparency I feel like that erodes trust.
Aesthetics are Important
If I didn’t care what my site looked like, I wouldn’t have paid an artist to design it or hand-code all the templates myself. I see so many blogs out there where advertising has just taken over, and it makes me not want to come back to that site. It is easy to do ads the wrong way, and have your site take a turn for the worse. Recently, on BusinessPundit (not to pick on Rob May, because he has no control over the advertising on that site), there were some talking ads that completely altered the experience of the site, and popups that showed up some time after that. I would want to keep my site as distraction-free as possible to make it a unique viewing experience.
Money Shouldn’t Drive Content
If you read a lot of the stuff put out by those internet marketers, they develop their content based on what will sell. They write posts based on Google popularity, SEO keywording, and other false ways of beefing up traffic. I’d never want to be in that situation, to be writing about what is popular just for the sake of increased advertising traffic. By writing for myself, I get to stay true and honest—to write for writing’s sake.
Evaluating my Peers
There are a lot of people that I respect and content that I value that does have ads, like Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends, Rob May at BusinessPundit, Guy Kawasaki at How to Change the World, and Darren Rowse at Problogger (the advertising juggernaut that teaches other writers to advertise!). There are also others that don’t, like Charles H Green at Trust Matters, Chris Anderson at The Long Tail and, well, Rob May at Coconut Headsets. (It is interesting to note that when he started writing for different reasons than he does at Business Pundit, and while he is writing for himself, the ads became less important.) Looking at their sites helps me decide what I do and don’t like, but it doesn’t help me with outside influence on my decision here.
Being True to Myself
I start out this year 2008 with a mission to never settle for less than 100% quality in everything I do here on Small Business Essentials. I continued this commitment by adding the links feed, extending my site to other platforms like Facebook and Twitter, participating in the business blogosphere, and creating (what I consider) to be original, valuable content. Somehow, the thought of monetizing this site through third part advertising diminishes that in some way. This may be only an internal perception, however—perhaps my own issues with money cloud my judgement of what is real in this case.
Limiting my Options
If I choose to not monetize the site, it makes me more actively seek out other ventures that would be income-producing. In this way, it is enticing to keep this blog as my writing playground and to use other means to expand revenue. (That revenue, then, would go back into funding this little hobby blog of mine.)
The Future of Small Business Essentials
I have decided to try a few hand-selected advertising items for the time being to try it out while I consider if this is really what do to. After about a day of thought on this subject, and as of right now, I am leaning towards removing them again and just continuing to write as I always have. I will give it a few weeks to make this decision though, and if the ads are permanent, I may have to do another site redesign to make them fit better with the site.
Thoughts?
I’d love to hear feedback on the ads as they are now, your blog/monetization strategy, the purpose of writing, or anything else for that matter.
Link - Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:21:11 GMT - Feed (1 subs) Sent using SendMeRss.com. Visit here to unsubscribe from “2-business” via X2 in Google. Recommended Feeds/Actions Subscribe MSNBC.com: Aging
Rubicon Project Sucks!
Rubicon project is for websites/blogs to get maximum income from their advertisers. This project optimizes the ads based on highest paying keywords, geographic locations and so on! They want you to make more money 
They integrated their project with lots of advertising networks. They support Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Chitika, Commission Junction, CPA Empire, Tribal Fusion and so on!
The Geographic targeting is an interesting feature with this project. Many people make more outta their website with this! If you want to show Adsense to US visitors and CJ to Indian Visitors, it is possible with Rubicon Project.
You’ve to create an account at Rubicon Project to enjoy these features. Also, Keep in mind, rubicon will collect money from all advertisers and will pay you later. This is a nice try in the Advertising markey. “Publishers can optimize the ads at their website” - Great. But the founders of Rubicon Project has no revenue model for their project yet!
So, you read about the positives of Rubicon Project. Here is its flip side. This is a screenshot when I tried to implement an advertisement at my sidebar. The ads are overlapped by Google Adsense. It sucks for me!(With my old theme..)
This may work to you! Just give a try to Rubicon Project.
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Go To Affiliate Summit West On Me
Do you want to go to the Affiliate Summit that’s happening next month in Las Vegas but don’t have the $1,449 entry fee? Well, you are in luck! It just so happens I have an extra full conference pass that I don’t have a need for. Therefore, I figured I’ll give it to a deserving reader.
If you would like to receive this $1,449 ticket, write a post on why you want it, why you deserve it and what you hope to get out of the Affiliate Summit. Then send me the URL to the post. The best post will win the ticket. I’m only paying for the full conference pass (well, I may pay for dinner too). You still need to arrange your own air and hotel accommodations. The winner will be drawn at the end of this month. This will give you enough time to book your flight to Vegas.
I will be speaking at the Affiliate Summit on a panel with Zac Johnson and Amit Mehta on Tuesday in a session call Super Affiliate Strategies that Work. The panel will be moderated by Kristopher Jones of Pepperjam. You cannot afford to miss this session. See you in Las Vegas!
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Engaging users with policy-compliant images and video
As it’s becoming easier and easier to embed videos and pictures on websites, many publishers are now enhancing their current text content with relevant videos and photos. We wholeheartedly support adding these different forms of content to improve the user experience on your site — hey, we like watching entertaining YouTube videos too! But here’s a friendly reminder about keeping our program policies in mind when you choose video and image content for your site.Before posting videos or pictures on a page with Google ads, put yourself in an advertiser’s position and consider whether you would want to have your ad displayed on the page. If your content might potentially be seen as offensive or disturbing, an advertiser may not be comfortable running their ads on that page. Here are a few specific types of content that you can check for:Adult or mature: Includes, but is not limited to, images and videos containing sexual activity, full nudity, and lewd poses. Please review this recent post to determine whether your content might fall into this category.Violent or gory: Can include images and videos of street-fighting, people hurting each other, or gruesome accidents and their victims.Culturally insensitive or hate speech: Includes content promoting racial intolerance or advocating against a specific individual, group, or organization.Also, keep in mind that publishers may not place AdSense ads on pages involved in the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials. Unauthorized copyrighted materials include music, movies, images, or any other copyrighted material that the publisher does not own or license from the copyright owner.The list above is by no means exhaustive, since there are always some borderline cases which will feature content that may be tame to one person but offensive to another. If you’re uncertain about specific pictures or videos, we recommend that you err on the side of caution and refrain from placing this content on pages containing Google ads. In addition, if you host a site with user-generated content, we ask that you continually monitor your network to ensure that ads don’t appear alongside the types of content described here.Posted by Dan Zilic - AdSense Publisher Support
