I’ll keep this short and to the point. It has been a long time since I found another marketer who impresses me. To impress me you only have to do one thing - show me a system that actually makes money and is easily duplicated. Ok two things - show me the system for free. That’s not really asking much is it? The list of marketers who meet this criteria could be counted on one hand. In other words there are very few people that really make a living online using a system that can be divulged to others without it causing the system to stop working. I tell people (for free) how to make money online using SEO and Adsense.How to Flip Websites and Products for ProfitJason AKA The University Kid has a system for selling product and flipping websites that he has made available for free. Read the post linked to above and then shuffle over to his new site MakeMoneyDynamo and download his free ebook which explains exactly how to make money online selling ebooks and then how to make even more money by flipping the ebook’s domain. It’s a clever system that can be duplicated as many times as you feel motivated to do it.In case it matters I am not being paid to promote this (it’s free anyway). I simply want to offer my readers another alternative for making money online and to introduce you all to Jason who caught my attention a while back and has steadily built up a site that delivers real info and real methods for earning a living online. Keep it up Jason - you are a breath of fresh air in this niche.Btw - I am on vacation (yes - again) while waiting for the lake to finish freeze-up and haven’t touched my emails for the past two weeks - sorry if you have been waiting for a reply. I am busy with some real world business matters at the moment but should be home in the next week. CheersGriz
Turkeys, thanks, and taxes
This Thanksgiving weekend, we’d like to take a moment to ask our U.S.-based publishers to spend a little post-turkey time (when you’re not watching football or taking advantage of those Black Friday bargains) to review your AdSense tax information. Tax season is just around the corner and we want to make sure that we give the IRS the most accurate information. So please pay a quick visit to your AdSense account, and double-check your payee name — that’s the name that we send payments to –and the tax information you’ve provided, especially your Social Security or Employer Identification Number. Does the info in your account correspond exactly to the info in your tax documents? If not, you may want to consider updating your payee name so that everything matches up.You can resubmit your tax information by logging in and following the steps in our Help Center. Keep in mind that we’ll be sending out tax forms to publishers who qualify during the month of January.Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Publisher Support
Happy Thanksgiving from AdSense
It’s Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. tomorrow, and so we’d like to give thanks to all of our publishers (especially our dedicated blog readers!) for your participation in the AdSense program. If you’re a U.S. publisher, we hope you have a happy and turkey-filled holiday weekend, whether you’re celebrating at home or traveling over the river and through the woods.Happy Thanksgiving!Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support
Some Google SEO Myths
There are many myths floating around Google in particular and SEO in general. Given here are the Google related myths as per the John Mueller’s “Frightening Webmastering Myths” presentation at “Tricks and Treats” webmaster event.
Duplicate content will penalize your site. [Don’t worry too much about duplicates on/from your own site. But be reasonable while using content from other sites]
Mixing HTML/XHTML will break verification
Getting listed in 1000s of search engines and directories is important. [search engines can find you, no need for submitting to directories]
Participating in AdWords, AdSense or Analytics will help or harm your site. [They won’t]
If a keyword is important, it’s important to repeat it in important locations on important pages so that the page looks more important to important search engines. [Write only with your readers in mind]
Using XML Sitemaps will make your site drop. [It doesn’t]
PageRank is dead / PageRank is everything! [Its not dead, but is also not everything, there are 200 more factors]
Resubmitting your site regularly is vital. [Not required]
Once your site ranks high, don’t touch it. [People need fresh content also]
Valid (X)HTML will make your site rank higher. [No]
# Using “disallow” in your robots.txt will remove your site/page from the index.
The more links the better.
The only important goal when making a website is getting it listed first in search results.
It’s best to let old URLs return 404 so that the new structure is naturally discovered.
Using “Index, Follow” in robots meta tags is important.
Hosting your site on a shared IP address will cause your rankings to drop.
[Reproduced from John Mueller’s “Frightening Webmastering Myths” presentation slides.
The forecast is clear in Google Ad Manager
If you’re a publisher who sells advertising space directly to advertisers, you might have experienced times when you’ve been unsure about how much inventory is available for you to sell. Google Ad Manager can help you learn what you have available to sell by forecasting your future inventory and subtracting off what you’ve already sold. A Helpful AnalogyTo put this into context, pretend for a minute that instead of a website, you run a popular destination hotel. Instead of selling space to advertisers, your job is to book hotel stays for guests. You receive all kinds of requests to book hotel rooms: two rooms for a one-week family vacation, 100 rooms for a three-day conference, a suite for a weekend getaway. In order to book these reservations, you have to know both how many rooms your hotel has and how many rooms are already booked. For a hotel, this is fairly straightforward. You know exactly how many total rooms the hotel has, and you can subtract how many rooms are booked for each night. For a publisher, it’s not as straightforward. Since the amount of inventory you have to sell is directly tied to your site’s traffic, it can vary day by day. It’s also complicated because there’s flexibility in how you meet your obligations. If an advertiser has booked advertising space on your Finance and Entertainment sections, for example, you can serve more ads on the Finance page and fewer on the Entertainment page. To compare to a hotel, it’s like you have the flexibility to substitute two single rooms for one double room. Because of the variability of traffic and the flexibility in how you can satisfy your reservations, it’s hard to know exactly how much space you have left to sell for any day or any specific area of your website.A Common Problem - and SolutionEven though it’s more complicated for websites than for hotels, the customers’ (or advertisers’) needs are the same: They want a reservation, and you have to be able to guarantee that there will be availability when they show up. A hotel can’t operate effectively without this type of capability, and neither can these web publishers. Google Ad Manager, our hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with smaller direct sales teams, addresses this publisher problem. It allows you to predict future availability and be confident that when you sell an ad, you’ll be able to deliver it. In Ad Manager, forecasting works by using your historical data to estimate how many impressions you have left to sell. Ad Manager’s inventory forecasting system allows you to find availability broken down by different areas of your website, by cities or states, and even by custom criteria that you define, like the user’s age. Even better, when the inventory you request is unavailable, Ad Manager will give you suggestions for freeing-up the requested inventory, so that you can still make the sale. New ImprovementsIn the last few weeks, we’ve rolled out major improvements to our forecasting system. It’s now up to ten times faster, and it uses much more historical data, so you get more accurate estimates of future availability. The new system allows us to quickly add new features in the future. We’ve already launched one of these improvements: Forecasts now take account of frequency caps, meaning that the availability estimates are modified to account for the fact that you might only want to show an ad once to each user. And more new features are coming soon!Forecasting also continues to be a major development focus of our DART for Publishers (DFP) ad serving platform for publishers with larger direct sales teams, part of the DoubleClick Revenue Center suite of publisher solutions. Google Ad Manager serves as an effective complement to DFP and the DoubleClick Revenue Center to provide solutions for publishers of all sizes.To learn more about forecasting in Ad Manager, visit the Ad Manager Help Center.Posted by Narayana Tummala - Tech Lead, Google Ad Manager
Optimisation Essentials (Part III)
Position for performance - be noticedThis is the final video installment in our three-part series on Optimisation Essentials for AdSense for content. We’ve covered the best-performing ad unit sizes and taken a look at how to design your ad units for good-looking ads. However, even if you have large, well-designed ad units, they won’t perform for you unless your users can see them!So what can you do to ensure your ad units get noticed? Place your ads where users are likely to look. We’ve also made a heatmap to show you where the best placements are on a typical page. Great positions include:Above the fold of a page (the section of the page a user can see without scrolling)At the end of an articleAligned with contentBut don’t just take our word for it - every website is different. Make sure you use your judgment of how visitors interact with your pages to determine good ad placements. Position your ads so that they’re visible, but be careful of intruding on the experience of your site’s visitors. Most of all, think like a user and you’ll be able to balance your website’s content with a successful ad strategy.Posted by Mel Ann Chan - AdSense Australia Optimisation Team
Beyond AdSense - Website Magazine
This months Website Magazine is starting to hit the shelves and I am receiving some pretty good feedback about the article I wrote titled “Beyond Adsense”. In the article I talk about how I started with AdSense years ago and how I evolved to other forms of advertising.
This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog
Beyond AdSense - Website Magazine
Now serving overlay ads in embedded YouTube partner videos
Today, to help its video content partners earn more money, YouTube will begin running overlay ads in YouTube partner videos embedded on other websites. To date, YouTube has only run ads against partner videos on YouTube itself, and with people viewing millions of embedded YouTube videos every day, this meant that partners were not generating revenue from their views outside YouTube.com. But now, YouTube partners will be able to capitalize on their popularity across the internet and generate revenue from their content no matter where their video lives.Although this may sound similar to AdSense video units, this YouTube change is separate from AdSense, and we’d like to discuss the differences between the two offerings. Let’s start with a refresher on AdSense video units, which are available within AdSense accounts in specific languages and regions. Video units help you enrich your website with fresh, dynamic content from our YouTube partners. Each video unit is accompanied by a banner ad and a overlay ad targeted towards the video and the site’s content, and is customizable so you can choose categories of video to target to your site. The ad revenue is divided between the AdSense publisher, YouTube, and the YouTube partner providing the video content. But AdSense video units aren’t the only way our YouTube partners can distribute their content — just as with other YouTube videos, it’s possible for anyone with a website to embed partner videos on their sites. Now, following today’s announcement, thousands of videos produced by YouTube partners will begin displaying overlay ads when embedded on other websites. (YouTube will gradually roll out these ads to additional YouTube partner videos in the coming weeks.) This feature is external to AdSense, and so no configuration within an AdSense account is needed. Revenue from these ads will be divided between YouTube and the YouTube partner providing the video content. By helping YouTube partners generate additional revenue no matter where their videos are played, we hope to encourage further content creation among our most popular and prolific video creators. If you create your own video content and are interested in becoming a YouTube partner, submit an application today.Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support
Optimisation Essentials (Part II)
Dress for success - impressing your audienceThe video below is the second in our “Optimisation Essentials” series, demonstrating our top three tips for maximising your AdSense for Content performance. Last week, we reinforced the importance of bigger ad units. This week, we’re showcasing how a better ad unit design can result in improved AdSense performance.*Please note that no leopards were harmed in the making of this video!Over the years, we’ve seen some colourful ad unit designs. Some publishers design ad units that contrast with their site so that they stand out. Although this can work in some cases, we’ve found that ad units that match your site’s design tend to perform better in terms of revenue and click-through-rate. Users are more likely to read ads when they’re well integrated into your site.When you design your AdSense ads, keep these tips in mind:Use colours that either blend with or complement your site’s colours. Make the ads a part of your site.Use lighter colours for borders, or no border at all.Try rotating colours or occasionally switching the location of your ads on the page.Save sets of frequently-used colours as a palette.So give your ad design and colours some thought, and you’ll notice the difference!Posted by Mel Ann Chan - AdSense Australia Optimisation Team
How to Make Money
Sorry for the bland Post Title my friends but I won’t be giving away my topics in the titles anymore and if you want to know why then read on.For the past month I have been fiddling with this blog in order to come to a few basic conclusions. The goal of this blog is to make money with Adsense and not just a little money but rather I want it optimized to bring in the most earnings possible. I have written extensively on this topic before and I am currently trying to fashion a short “everything you need to know about Adsense” book for others to duplicate my success so I won’t get into much here. Oh for those interested, you can see my Adsense earnings for the past year here Make Money with AdsenseWhat I will tell you is that your post title is the hinge that your adsense income swings on. Yes there is more to it than that but in brief let me fill you in on what I have been doing.My last post was entitled “Does Trackback Spamming Make Money Online” and no sooner did I post the article than my earnings per click dropped in half - about 30 cents per click. The post prior to it was entitled Make Money Online in Canada. While that post sat on the front page I earned 60 cents per click.So why the sudden drop in earnings?I’m going to keep this short and simple.Below is a list of keywords visitors have used over the past hour and half (approx) to find my site.Click Image to enlarge.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what keyword brings in the most search traffic. “How to Make Money” is by far my best traffic gatherer.Now let me explain this so that there is no confusion.Your post title sets the tone of your post in regards to how the Adsense Bot reads your page. Yes it looks at other factors but the single biggest factor is the Post Title.When it read the last post it determined that my main focus was on “Trackback Spamming” and when it failed to find relevant ads for that term it then produced ads for “make money online”. However it did not provide me with the prime ads for make money online because the post was really about trackback spamming. My traffic came looking for “how to make money” and clicked on the ads but G paid me half of normal because the traffic really wasn’t targeted for the post title.Today the Adsense bot will give me prime ads for “How to Make Money” and the majority of my traffic will come here looking for exactly that - and I will get the best earnings per click.I will be discussing a number of my findings over the past month in a series of short posts (yes faithful readers - just 1 cup posts) starting soon.I will leave this post for you to think about - if you are using adsense and not making more than a few cents a click then you now know the biggest reason for your dismal earnings.You need targeted traffic and targeted posts.Cheers,GrizUpdate Nov 12I thought it might be useful to show what happened as far as my Adsense Earnings reacted to the change in post titles. I posted the “Trackback Post” late on November 6 and while the day finished with decent earnings you can see below how quickly the revenue began dropping over the next several days. I posted the “How to Make Money” post on Nov 10 and look at how quickly my earnings changed direction.Click Image to Enlarge.
Griz
Political ads on AdSense sites
During the recent U.S. election period, our team heard your concerns and feedback regarding political ads appearing on publisher sites. As a Product Manager who helps build the AdSense product, I’d like to take a moment to explain our ad targeting technology and policies, and what we’re working on to offer you even more controls.Ad Targeting I wanted to help clarify first how advertisers are able to target your sites. As you know, ads that appear on AdSense sites are provided by advertisers participating in the AdWords program. To help publishers earn revenue, advertisers are able to target ads not only based on the content of a site, but also based on the audience of the site. When we first started AdSense in 2003, we only offered contextually-targeted ads; advertisers bid on keywords, and our system matched those keywords to the content of publishers’ pages. As we developed the product, we expanded these targeting capabilities. For instance, placement targeting allows advertisers to select specific topics, sites, and pages on which they want their ads to run. In the U.S., our placement targeting tool also allows advertisers to find sites serving a specific audience, such as “Males ages 18-24.”To help new and existing publishers better understand our targeting options, our support teams will be reviewing and expanding the material available on our Help Center and homepage to make sure it better communicates our offerings. In addition, we’ll be exploring different methods of explaining this information, such as through webinars and videos, and demonstrating how publishers can optimize their sites to take advantage of these targeting options.Advertising PoliciesWe also received questions about why political ads are able to run on Google and AdSense sites. The Google advertising program is managed by a set of editorial policies that we have developed based on various factors, including user and customer experience. While Google or its executives and employees may express opinions about specific political issues and candidates, Google’s advertising system does not favor one political position over another. Our network provides advertisers with a way to reach their audience, whether they are companies selling products or political campaigns promoting candidates or issues. Just as Google’s advertising system does not favor one car manufacturer’s ads over a competitor’s in our auction, we also allow ads regardless of the particular political position they represent.Publisher Ad ControlAs we’ve expanded to new forms of advertiser targeting, we’ve also added controls for the ads that can appear on your sites. Our automated targeting technology will never understand your users as well as you, so it’s important that you have the ability to control their ad experience. For example, we mentioned earlier this week that tools such as the Competitive Ad Filter and Ad Review Center are designed for you to prevent specific ads from appearing on your pages. We’ve heard your feedback about how quickly filters take effect and the ability to block specific categories of ads, and we’re working hard to improve our current controls and provide more powerful ones in the near future. Over the next couple weeks, we plan to improve the speed of your filters, and we’re working towards filters in the future that will take effect in less than an hour. We’ll also continue improving the Ad Review Center, giving you ways to block entire categories of ads in addition to individual ads. We are also working on ways for you to establish guidelines for the type of ads that will be acceptable to your users, so you can “set it and forget it,” while feeling comfortable that users will have a good ad experience. One of our goals with AdSense is to help you easily generate revenue for your site without much work, so that you have more time to focus on developing great content. Many of our best ideas, like the Ad Review Center, are inspired by your feedback and suggestions. Please keep letting us know how we can make AdSense a better product.Posted by Jason Miller - Group Product Manager, AdSense
Site maintenance on Saturday, November 8
Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance tomorrow, November 8th at 10 am PST. Although you won’t be able to log in to your account for approximately 4 hours, your ad targeting and serving won’t be affected, and you’ll continue to be credited for valid clicks and impressions. Here’s the start time in a few international cities:London - 6pm SaturdayJohannesburg - 8pm Saturday Madurai - 11:30pm SaturdayManila - 2am SundaySydney - 5am SundayPosted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support
My Google Adsense eCPM Fear
I am a regular visotor to the DP forum. I see many people there fearing Google Adsense as to when their account will get banned. They say that they don’t know when they will received that email from Google saying that their account is banned. Do I fear that? What is my fear about Google Adsense?
Well I don’t fear much that the Google will ban my Adsense account. The reason is simple. I don’t try to cheat them. And, I am sure they are technology advanced enough to find out who is trying to cheat and who is a genuine publisher.
But then what is my fear?
My biggest fear with Google Adsense is their highly fluctuating eCPM rates. I hate it (and fear it) when I see the eCPM fluctuating from month to month. And these are not just for one site, but a collection of around 100 sites combined in various niches. I will explain you with a simple example.
From last 6 months, my traffic to my company’s websites is increasing month after month and has never dropped. But still, month on month my eCPM various so much that my earnings sometimes takes a dip of up-to 25%. There has been times in these six months that my earnings in my company’s Google Adsense account was $38,000 but then it was $32,000 next month (which has even higher number of page views).
This fear of fluctuating eCPM is so high that my company cannot rely on Google Adsense as a source of “consistent revenue”. This is the reason when my company booked a new office for Rs. 20,000,000 ($440,000) it had to rely on me for the extra funds in case on urgent needs for the consistent payments. Company was not sure whether the eCPM of Google will decrease or will increase. So how can it rely on these earnings for the payment.
This is my biggest Adsense fear. What is yours? Do you fear Google Adsense for something? Please share.
Other Side of Flipping Websites
These days many people are into the business of “flipping websites.”
What is the concept of flipping website, and how does it works? What does the person, who buys it, do with it?
Flipping website is a concept of “creating a website just for the sole purpose of selling it quickly for few bucks“. In general these websites have 10 to 15 pages of good content (optimized for Adsense) and on an average 3 months old. They are sold when the stats starts showing that the traffic has started coming to the site from search engines. Mostly these sites are sold from $100 to $200 range.
I have never flipped a website. But I always buy such sites. Why? There are many reasons behind it.
The seller has already done the research to find some good long tail keyword which can bring in easy traffic from search engines. That saves my time in doing this research.
The seller has already found the best possible domain name optimized for the keyword (so that he can sell it for more).
I can read and review the content on the site to see whether it is good quality or not. In comparison, if I have to ask somebody to write the content for me, I am not sure that the quality of the content would be good or not.
The seller has already done some off-site SEO to get some links from social bookmarking sites etc., so that search engines find it and start sending traffic to it. People don’t buy sites with zero traffic. So they try to bring some SE traffic and then only try to sell it. 
Site is already 3 months old and would add to the aging factor (though only of 3 months) when I compare it with creating a new website from scratch.
So, what do I do with the site after buying it?
I just do the following:
I add my adsense, kontera and some more advertising networks
I submit it to my network of directories, which bring good PR and backlinks.
I ask my team to do 7 day SEO work for the site
And, then I almost forget it.
Start searching for the next one on DP or SP forums
In the month of July and August 2008, I have bought around 20 such sites and hosted them all on a new shared server (under a test to see whether this business feasible and profitable). The total cost of them is $2840. But now the total earnings from these 20 sites combined brings in is much more than 10% of $2840.
So, this is another business of buying flipped websites and groom them to milky sites, which can give you more milk in the long term. The only thing you need to concentrate is which one to buy and which one to avoid as there are hundreds of them getting sold on forums.
Go ahead and buy a few miniature gems. Who know they may turn out as big monster in the future.