I made two new lenses on Squidoo today. Guess I had a sudden rush of inspiration come over me =) Ok - truth is that I came across some good keywords and decided to test them out. I like to test niche markets on Squidoo. The stats Squidoo offers on our dashboards are pretty good these days and that makes Squidoo a wonderful testing ground for potential niche markets I’m thinking of expanding on. And hey, Squidoo pays, too…. not a bad deal, is it?

Anyway, as I started making my first lens today, I wrote down what I was doing as I went through the lens creation process the way I do it. As I was looking over my notes I thought, “Hey, this would make a good blog post for my readers!” So - here we go:

How to Make a Lens on Squidoo

Step 1:
Before I ever step “foot” into Squidoo, I do some brainstorming first. Sometimes my brainstorming comes from a product idea, sometimes it comes from a keyword idea - hence, the “chicken/egg” nickname. Regardless of what came first, the keyword or the product, both product research and keyword research are required

If I found a product that looks promising, I do heavy keyword research to find those little golden nugget keywords that have decent search volume but little competition. I use Wordtracker. Wordtracker is flat out the best keyword research tool around - hands down. (Note: Wordtracker is not free, but you can get a free trial run with it by clicking here

On the other hand, sometimes I am playing around in Wordtracker and I find some sweet keywords, so then I do product research to see if there is a way to monetize my idea. Either way it happens, I always have at least one product in mind and a list of keywords to focus on.

2. Write content:To me, having my main content written before I get to Squidoo to create a lens is very important. I can focus completely on my content and make sure it is keyword optimized properly before I get to messing with any of the modules, etc. I want to be sure that my content is high-quality and could stand on it’s own without all the other whistles and bells. In essence, the above steps are just like article marketing.

Sometimes, I use PLR (Private Label Rights) articles for the content on my lenses. PLR means I didn’t actually write the content, but I have rights to it that I can change it up, edit the article, and add my name to it as if it was my own work. Problem with PLR content is that most likely, it has already been indexed on the internet - meaning I am not using unique content on my lens. That’s why I re-write the PLR articles to make them unique. I use a free web-based program called DupeCop to make sure my re-write is at least 30% unique from the original article. Therefor, my Squidoo content will be seen as unique content by the search engines and I won’t suffer any duplicate content penalties.

3. Create a lens: Yup, time to go to Squidoo. I have my keywords, I have my content, and I have my products. I go to Squidoo, click “create a lens” and go through the steps.

– First, I give my new lens a title. I don’t stress over this too much because this can be changed at any time. I also always tend to choose “do my own thing” when asked what I want to do with my lens. Why? I guess just because I like working with a “blank piece of paper”. I guess that is really just personal preference.

– Second, I give my lens 3 main keyword tags. Again, not a big stress thing either - these tags can be changed and added at any time. Key thing to remember is that if your title is a strong keyword, make sure to add it to your tags.

– Third, its choosing a url time. I believe the words you choose for your url are very important. I like to get my best keywords in here if at all possible. There are over a quarter of a million lenses in Squidoo now - odds are, your first choice might already be taken. Don’t be afraid to use hyphens if needed - I use them all the time. I think that when someone sees your url on Google as a search return, that it is easier for them to read puppy-training-tips than it is to read puppytrainingtips. Google doesn’t “read” hyphens, so it’s all good to do it that way.

Thats all for the actual set-up part. Enter your capcha code and get into edit mode for your new lens

4. Putting the lens together:Since I chose “do my own thing” in the original set-up for my new Squidoo lens, I get into edit mode and only have an intro module - and nothing else.

Content comes first. I choose “add more modules” and get 4 or 5 new text modules, click save and get to copy/pasting my pre-written content in.

Some things to remember -

– Your intro module is VERY important. Make sure your keywords are in there and you follow good SEO rules here. (Hint: I offer some great SEO tactics for Squidoo lenses as part of my nine-ebook Squidoo Profit System).

– My pre-written content is never intended to fill only one module. I will use all 4 or 5 modules and fill it with the content I have already written. When I wrote the content, I broke it into sections. Each section/module will have its own well keyworded title. Module titles are also VERY important.

5. Linking/monetization:Now, I take the steps for my lens to do what it is intended to do. For some, it is to drive traffic to a site, for others it is for affiliate products… whatever the purpose is, I go back in my lens and link as needed.

6. Beautification: Time to “dress up” my lens. I add images, Rss feeds, guestbook, etc, etc to make the lens flow, look better, and suit my needs.

7. Tags: Remember that keyword list I already had prepared? This is where it comes into play. I used that keyword list at first to write my content, now I use it to add relevant tags to my lens.

8. Pre-Publish: Now, I usually hit publish to take a look at my almost finished product. I read through it, check for typos and bad grammar and look for opportunities to bold this, space here, italics there - all to make the readers experience more enjoyable.

9. Clean ‘er Up! Last shot in “edit mode” as I make any edits I feel I need. Then I hit “publish” and git’r done!

10. “View This Page” and admire my work! Thats all folks!

Squidoo has become yet a famous phenomenon that enriches the arsenal of Internet Marketing tools. With the availability of Squidoo it is even easier to start an internet home business within an hour with a website (=lens) to promote your products.

Seth Godin founded Squidoo and launched the website in October 2005. It is a platform designed to make it easy for anyone, for free, to set up a single page on a topic he or she knows or cares a lot about. It's a social network of user-generated lenses -single pages that highlights one person's point of view, recommendations, or expertise.

Users of Squidoo, or lensmasters can use a lens template to create links, feeds, abstracts, and lists for other users. There are different modules that allow you to create Flickr photos, maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, iTunes music, Amazon products, and other links. You can get all these functions on your lens for free within an hour. You can even earn money with Squidoo since there are standard incorporated Adsense ads on the lenses, and you can sell for example (e-)books or other products for Amazon or other shopping chains. Squidoo splits its revenue with its "co-op" of lensmasters. 5% goes straight to charity, first. Then 50% goes to the lensmasters. 45% goes to Squidoo.

Because Squidoo is quite popular with, and if you have an internet home business, with or without a website, then it is advisable to employ Squidoo as one of the Internet Marketing tools to promote your products. No matter what of internet home business you are involved in, everyone's dream ticket is a first page ranking in Google's search results.

I you have an existing website with a page rank (PR), link your lens to the website pages to improve the ranking of your lens first. Over time your lens will be indexed by and will give a PR link (and traffic) to your website in return. You could promote the same or different products on your website and lens.

If you don't have a website, you can create a lens and promote your products immediately. Over the past months, Squidoo lenses have been showing up on the first page of Google for very competitive search terms.

In fact my first lens was about a very competitive Internet Marketing keyword phrase (135,000,000 results). In a couple of days my lens showed up as No. 19 in Google.....and it didn't cost me a penny to get there. For comparison, it took me four months hard working on to get to the same position in for the same search term, while I had to pay web fee monthly and other costs to do the SEO. Although my lens in this case was 'pulled up' by my website with higher Google position, it is easier to get it ranked by Google.

In conclusion, Squidoo is an easy, excellent, and above all free internet marketing tool. It should be employed to promote products and increase sales in every internet home business.

The number one way I get paid, is to write articles about getting paid to write articles.
You may need to read that again.

Looking back before I post, it does look very silly. But since everyone wants to know how to make extra money from home these days, this is precisely the way to get the job done. It wasn't until I was able to read between the lines and realize this, that I made any kind of spendable cash. Of course there are a million other ways to make a living, but trends come and go like the tide on this world wide circus. At this point I don't see article writing going anywhere because writing is what one does online, in one form or another. It's like breathing. Not only that, but who wants to pay to sign up and sell other people's junk? Nobody pays to get a job.

The thing you must pay close attention to when earning your living from home sweet home is to really make it worth people's time visiting your site. Your readers want something they can take away with them at no cost and information is what sells. It doesn't cost anything to teach a person something that will benefit them, and it's great to know you may have helped somebody out who seriously needed some assistance. You can provide resource links for them to follow, you'll get a page view, and a payment and in turn the reader gets a quality new venue for publishing their own materials. It's an absolute win-win situation for everyone.
Lots of sites do not have affiliate links, but post their homepage link anyway. There is plenty of money in this world for everyone, be nice-share! Invite your readers to post their links on your site too. This is mutually beneficial and you can help somebody get a head start by sending them some of your traffic.

I could go on all day with keywords, stats, facts and figures. I'm not much of a mathematical geek when it comes to adsense, but I do know I get traffic and at the end of the day that is exactly what people must have. I do frequent a couple of freelance sites where people commission others to write articles for them. As usual, some pay very well, while most want something for nothing, after all it is just human nature. Many thanks to google and sites like this one, thanks to persistance I can afford to be picky. I set my price and I don't budge from it. If I wanted minimum wage I would go back to work flipping artificial beef burgers on 3rd shift for minimum wage, after driving across town in the snow and ice.

When you post a new article on your blog, when you link to some other blog or some blog links back to you - Technorati is watching and indexing all information about your blog. Technorati does all this automatically, so how can you benefit from signing in for a technorati account. There is much more stuff offered to Technorati members that you need…

1. Claim Your Blog
Claiming you blog entitles you to add and modify your blog listing in Technorati. This is the first step and you need to confirm ownership of your blog. You need to put a little bit of code on your site, ping Technorati and it will verify that it is indeed your blog. And you get your own blog page (our blog)

2. Edit Blog Description
Once you claim your blog, you can configure your blog settings. Set the description to whatever you like. Fill in your target keywords. Tell them what language your blog is about.

3. Tweak Your Profile
All article listings in Technorati have a link to the author of the blog. This link leads to your technorati profile. This displays all your blogs, their tags and lists the top tags you blog about. Create a meaningful profile to show you are a problogger.

4. Add a Photo
Those with a technorati account can add a nice attractive photo of anything they want. In a long list of results for any search term or tag, articles with photos gain prominence, attract the reader and have a higher chance of getting clicked and drive free traffic to your site.

5. Add the Right Tags
How do you find blogs that frequently write about the subjects you care about? Add your tags and get found on the Technorati Blog Finder page. Become a member to add and modify tags. Claiming a blog lets you enable lisiting your blog in Technorati’s Blog Finder. Choose the right keywords to drive traffic from Technorati. This is the way to get listed in Blogs about Technology.

6. Keep a Watchlist
Members can maintain a watchlist and keep track of your favorite searches. Add some terms or a web page URL to your Watchlist and never miss a single article about your keywords. Get breaking news in the blogosphere as it happens.

7. Track Favourite Blogs
Track the latest posts from your favorite blogs all in one nice interface. You can easily add blogs by entering URLs, or clicking the star in any search result. A nice alternative to your usual RSS feed newsreader. Add us to Technorati Favorites. Try it, you can always remove it.

8. Display All Your Blogs
The profile page gives you an opportunity to display all the blogs you have claimed. Claim all your blogs and help readers find and subscribe to all your blogs. Let them know your multiblogging talents.

9. Put Technorati on your site
Members can put a nice script with a technorati search, their photo, links to technorati profile and a “Blogs that link here link” that shows how many blogs are linking to your site. You can also add the Technorati Favorites widget that shows the last three posts from your favorite blogs, and a handy search box to search your favorite blogs.

10. Blogs by Country
For example, how do you get your blog added to Blogs about Canada. Add the tag Canada in your tag choices and get listed in the Canada blogs. Only members may add a country tag and get listed like this.

OK, so by now you are totally “tuned-in” to blogs and all the wonderful things they can do to help spread the word about you, your company and your ideas. You've seen the power of good blog PR. A mention or two on a prominent blog and traffic to your own blog soars. But their doesn't seem to be any formula for getting those mentions. You keep sending those press releases and you submit every post you write to the popular sites but still the results are hit and miss. You decide to try harder. You begin to email everything to everyone hoping to up the percentage of signal by producing more noise.

Wrong, wrong wrong. You're thinking broadcast in a relationship world. Bloggers, especially popular bloggers, can smell self promotion a mile away. They aren't the PR department for your business or blog. They want relevant value for their own audience. They want information that fits their blog and their voice. If you want their help promoting your ideas you need to know and understand their ideas. This is more complex then building a bigger email list of “marketing” bloggers to whom you can spew send your latest press release. This is about using all the tips and tools of customer intuition to build your blog PR Intuition.

Participate - You need to seriously read and participate in conversations on blogs. Leave relevant value adding comments. Use trackbacks where appropriate.

Link - If you want popular blogs to link to you be sure that you have already linked to them.

Explain Yourself - Don't just submit a URL or send a press release, talk to the blogger. Write a brief personal message explaining why you think a blogger and their audience will be interested in what you have to say.

Thank A Blogger - When a popular blog links to you and you see a good pop in your traffic and/or more inbound links send a brief thank you. Most bloggers are interested in the effects of their blogging. They'll be interested in brief accounts of what their blog does for others.

Be Human - When you are looking to spread your ideas treat others like humans not just email addresses. It's not about broadcasting it's about relationships.

Every blogger is on the lookout for different ways to increase their feed subscribers. You should be no exception. A common misconception is that just because you have more traffic you have more subscribers, this is not completely true.

What is true is that more traffic gives you more people to promote your feeds to, but if you are not successfully promoting you will not reach potential subscribers as you should be. If you take a look at the Technorati Top 100 you will find that even the most successful bloggers relentlessly promote their RSS feeds to their readers. So the big question is, what can you do to increase subscriptions for your blog?

Don’t be shy, just put it out there and recruit. Ask your readers to subscribe to your feeds, let them know you want them to. Include something catchy at the bottom of every post with a link to sign-up.
Place your RSS icons prominently. Make your feed subscriptions a main part of your design. Create a box that is big and bright with large icons so they stand out. Some people won’t think to sign-up if they aren’t reminded.
Another technique becoming more common is offering something to people for signing-up. Write an ebook or pamphlet on your topic that all subscribers get free access to.
Create a subscription page. Many bloggers are now creating subscription pages for people to go and easily sign-up.
These are four tips that if used correctly are sure to build your subscriber base. Do you have any techniques you use? Let us all know your secrets in the comments below.

It is always important to increase relationship with your blog readers. I wrote a post few days back on How to increase interactivity in your blog. In that post, I wrote on how you can make your visitors to take any action in your blog. This post will be on how to build good relationship with your blog readers and what you can do to make the relationship better.

Blogging is a good way to get friends and to tell the truth, I have got many friends. The best people who you can be friend with online are your blog readers, commentators and those who add your post to social sites. So you know whom you can be friend with and you can go and try to start a good relationship with them. Here are few things that you can do:

1. Comment On Their Blog
This is the easiest step and you can win many friends by just making a comment in their blogs. I try to comment on the blogs that link to me and also in the blogs of the people who make comments in my blog. Even a single ‘thank you’ can make wonders. From today, why not visit the blogs of those who comment in your blog and tell them thank you and also make a comment in their blog?



Image source: DerrickT
2. Have A Chat With Them
Having small chats in Google Talk or Skype a help the relationship grow. I have seen many A-list bloggers chat with new bloggers in chat clients. Though this will use some of your valuable time, you will get more than what you spend. You might get a really good friend with a 10 minute of chat. I don’t stay online in chat client very often if I have college. But on holidays I’m online most of the time and talk to people.

3. Help Them By Promoting Their Articles
This is a good way to get friends too. You can promote the articles of your blog readers or commentators. You can offer them a back link from your blog. You can link to their articles in your Sunday links or anything similar. You can even mention their articles in appropriate places in the guest posts you make. One more way of promoting their articles is by giving it a stumble or digg or del.icio.us or something similar. I suggest you not to promote articles which have no good content. But you can promote their good articles. I have got more than a dozen of good friends from social websites. You can get friends easily from social websites or even make your blog readers as your good friends by helping them with social websites.



Image Source: Bernard Mickey Wrangle
Building relationship with readers is important. To be successful, you should have friends and people who can help you at the time of failure. So start making your blog readers and commentators as your friends today. Just stop by their blog and say a ‘HI’. Talk to them when you are free (and of course when they are free). It is not easy to make new friends but once they become your friends they will be helpful to you (and you can in turn help them). Take the first step today and the rest of the steps will be easy. You will have a bunch of friends by the end of this month. Have you made any of your blog reader or commentator as your friend? What do you do to maintain good relationship? Have you been approached any time by any blogger in whose blog you made a comment?

Entrecard is one of the newest blog promotion sites that’s causing quite a buzz around the blogosphere. In short, Entrecard requires no monetary commitment but a fairly significant time commitment in order to provide real benefits.

Entrecard gives bloggers the opportunity to create a virtual business card that looks like a 125×125 ad. As an Entrecard member you’ll install a widget on your blog that provides a place for other Entrecard members to drop off their “cards” when they visit your blog as well as a place for other members to place their 125×125 ads (see the picture above). Members pay for ads with Entrecard “credits.”

You can earn credits by visiting other members’ blogs and dropping off your business card through their Entrecard widget (1 point), when someone else drops off a business card on your blog (1 point) and when someone pays you with credits to place an ad on your blog. Ads cost an amount of credits equal to twice as many cards that are dropped off on the site where you want to advertise each day, so if 100 people drop off cards at a site each day, it will cost 200 credits to advertise on that site. Members can approve or reject ads, which is a great feature, and approved ads run on that site for 24-hours.

It seems that Entrecard is a great way to generate traffic, but how much of that traffic is truly targeted (meaning they’re interested in your blog’s topic). In other words, how much of that traffic is staying on your blog for more than the few seconds it takes to click on the Entrecard widget to drop off their cards then moving onto the next site to drop off another card in order to build credits? Can Entrecard produce meaningful traffic that converts into loyal readers? I understand that the team behind Entrecard is trying to find a way to combat this “drop and dash” behavior, but as of today, it’s still the reality of Entrecard.

Of course, there are tertiary benefits to using Entrecard. Increased traffic can help your blog’s rankings which can potentially lead to advertisers being interested in advertising directly on your blog (possibly paying more to do so than they would have without Entrecard traffic). And it could be argued that each page view could lead to a click-through on another ad on your blog.

In terms of actually placing your own card as an ad on other members’ blogs through your Entrecard credits, this could be helpful to drive a lot more traffic if you save up credits to purchase ad placement on a very popular site (but remember, each ad unit you purchase is only up for 24-hours). Alternatively, it could be very helpful for strong niche sites, where you can specifically target other sites to place your Entrecard ad to drive relevant traffic that is likely to convert to loyal (or at least repeat) readers or to click on related ads.

Is Entrecard right for your blog? That really depends on your goals for your blog. As with any advertising or marketing opportunity, don’t be afraid to test it, track your results through your blog stats and see what works and what doesn’t in terms of reaching your goals. Then tweak your advertising and marketing strategy and try again.

In this article I reveal what I believe are the two most important ranking factors used by Google.

My findings are as a result of my ongoing optimization experiments of my network of web sites on Google.

The top two Google ranking factors are:

PageRank and Incoming Text Link Keywords

I'll explain each in more detail and what you MUST do to maximize the effectiveness of each element.

1. PageRank

PageRank is determined by the number and quality of links to a page. Both the quantity and quality of text links are important. Always try to get links from web pages with a PageRank rating of at least four.

Concentrate on getting as many different quality sites as possible to link to one page on your site, usually your home page. Do not spread the links to different pages. This will maximize the PageRank of your main page, plus those of the subpages.

2. Incoming Text Link Keywords

ALWAYS provide text links for linking to your site. Avoid image links.

Google does index image links, but without any text for it to index, it won't help your link popularity rating for your important keywords.

In addition:

Include the most important keyword phrase in the text link, using the EXACT spelling. Do not pluralize the keyword phrase, if people usually search the singular version of the phrase. And vice versa. Avoid excess words, where possible. The linked to page MUST have the text link keywords in the body of the page, otherwise Google will discount the page. Include the text link keywords within the title tag of the linked to page. It is possible for a page without the text link keywords in the title tag to get top rankings. But I have discovered that around 80% of top 10 rankings have the text link keywords in the title tag, so always include it.

Well, there you have it. Those are what I consider the two most important ranking factors used by Google. Other factors are considered by Google, but their importance pales in comparison to the two I have discussed in this article.

Follow these tips whenever you optimize your web pages and they will quickly shoot up the Google rankings.

The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you - the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.

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.

So, you want your Web site to rank high on Google and other search engines.

To do that, you're planning on hiring a search engine optimization (SEO) firm. Good move -- maybe. A good SEO firm can help make your rankings and sales skyrocket. That's the good news. The bad news is there are a lot of SEO firms out there that will charge you big bucks without delivering results. As someone in the SEO business myself, I've heard countless horror stories about people who have gotten ripped off by paying for services they didn't need, or simply not understanding what their SEO firm is supposed to be doing on their behalf.

Below are some of the things most SEO firms will never tell you. Knowing these insider secrets can save you thousands of dollars and many hours of frustration.

1. Most SEO work follows the 80/20 rule. In other words, 20% of the work will account for 80% of the results. If that's true (and believe me, from personal experience I know that it is), you should make sure that the fee structure reflects this. Ask for an itemized quote, so you can make sure that you aren't paying too much for the other 80%. For example, a lot of SEO experts will tell you they're going to spend X number of hours tweaking your site's keywords and meta tags, but there's really no hard evidence that those techniques have a significant impact on your rankings. Doing simple things like making sure your page structure is "search engine friendly" (ensuring all your pages can be indexed by search engines) is infinitely more important. As part of a comprehensive SEO strategy, you still want to do the other 80%, but you want to make sure that the bulk of the priority (and cost) is focused the effort that will produce the most results.

2. You can receive a guarantee. Most big SEO firms say to watch out for anyone who guarantees results. They'll tell you most places that do so are nothing but scam artists. Here's the truth: I can absolutely guarantee any business I can get you ranked in the top 10 on Google for any keyword you choose. It all depends on how much money you're willing to spend and how long you're willing to wait for the results. If an SEO firm is confident in their ability to improve your rankings, why wouldn't they offer you a guarantee?

3. You can see immediate results. Most SEO firms will try to tell you it takes months to see tangible results. Wrong. In fact, it's often possible to see results within a week, depending on the keywords you're targeting. I know because I've accomplished this for my clients time and time again. Unless you're going after extremely competitive keywords, if the SEO firm bidding for your business says it will take three months to accomplish anything, they're probably just looking to sign you up for a lucrative long-term retainer.

4. SEO work is not too complicated to explain in detail. Too many SEO experts will balk if you ask them to explain in detail the work they're going to do for you. But don't let them off the hook. While some strategies may indeed be technical, most of the techniques are easily explained -- especially some of the most important ones (see point #1 above about the 80/20 rule). If you're going to pay someone a lot of money to work for you, you deserve and explanation of exactly what they're going to do.

5. The greatest factor in SEO has nothing to do with your web site. In my research, I've found that around 80% of the Google ranking factors have nothing to do with the web site itself. The real determining factors are links to your site from other web sites. As long as your site is easily crawled by Google, most of the energy should be focused on getting these outside links. If an SEO firm tries to sell you an expensive package to simply "optimize" your site for Google, it's probably going to cost you a lot of money for very little result.

How can you persuade your visitors to click on the advertisings you are showing on your website and increase your site revenue?

On almost every website you find flashy banners that try to persuade you to click on the advert.

With banners?

This market segment seems a bit satisfied.

Today you are fortunate if you get a CTR (click through rate) of 0.02 %.

That is 1 click for 5000 views!!

With Google AdSense™?

An alternative offers Google AdSense™ or Yahoo™ advertising.

These text-adverts bring some tranquility in your web pages and they can be easily read with the content of the page.

But even here you can 'play' with colors, do you choose for contrasting colors so that the adverts look like banners or is it better to use colors that match the page layout? Google™ does not offer an answer.

With text links?

Text links are easily to implement in the text that visitors are reading, but with every edit of your page you need to adjust them.

Which then is the best method?

Because you do not know the visitors of your website personally, you do not know and you have to guess.

But each one of the above methods has their advantages.

Some visitors like flashy banners and other scroll them out of the screen to read or see only what they are interested in.

Solutions?

Well, the solution seems obvious...

On the same place on your website show sometimes a Flash banner, sometimes a Google AdSense™, a text-link or any other kind of advert.

So mix all the possibilities you have.

Of course it will take some advantage programming to do so.

Advantages.

Let's say you only have adverts like flash banners in a rotator, and the visitor to your site likes to read things off his interest in a quit environment, he or she would probably not click on the banners.

So your revenue or CTR = 0 %

If you only have Google AdSense™ adverts on a particular place on your site and the visitor does not like to read much at all...

Your revenue or CTR = 0 %

But if you rotate Google AdSense™ with image banners in the same rotator you have a 50/50 change that the visitor likes the advert, sees it and clicks on it.

Your revenue or CTR = 50 %

Also, if you are always showing a banner ad or a Google AdSense™ at the same position on your webpage, after a few visits it is not been seen anymore. Some kind of 'blindness'.

When all of a sudden the visitors see a Flashy advert instead of an AdSense™, or visa versa, it gets their attention and they might click on it.

And that is what you wanted in the first place.

Success

Google AdSense is a program that offers an easy way for web publishers to display ads relevant to their site on their pages and earn money. It also offers pay per impression, or pay per click advertising, options to businesses who want to get the word out about their product or service to interested customers. Once you start your AdSense account don’t forget about it and wait for money to start rolling in. There is still work to be done.

Since you will only make money from click-throughs on your site, you’ll need traffic – and the more traffic, the more money you’ll make. Here are some tips for getting the most from your AdSense dedicated space and for driving up traffic:


Location, location, location. Position your AdSense ads at the top of your page or near the focal point of your pages
Offer freebies or unique content. Free stuff is a big draw to visitors and more visitors equal more click throughs, which turns into more money in your wallet
Rotate content often and let your visitors know it’s always changing. It keeps them coming back for more.
Keep those email addresses. It’s important to keep the email addresses of your visitors and let them know when your content has changed. Consider offering a free newsletter or ezine to your visitors to stay in contact with them.
Add Google search to your site. In addition to offering visitors the convenience of searching on your site, you can make more money from Google by adding this feature.
Keep your graphics small and simple. Because graphics and animations take longer to load than text and links, the simpler your pages, the quicker they load. And the faster they load, the faster your visitors can click their way to your profit.
Keep the design simple and clear.

Reporting and monitoring is the next important step. Google has built in reporting features but you may want more detailed reports as well. The Google reports will show:


Total number of page impressions
Number of ad clicks and the click through rate
The cost per click (CPC) and cost per 1000 impressions (CPM)
Total earnings

While this is wonderful, valuable information, you may also want to know:


Click through rates of every page on every domain you are using AdSense on (the Google tool called “Channels” limits the information you get from each domain or ad type)
Keyword reports if you have the Google Search feature on your site(s), so you can optimize for those search words
Reporting in real time, rather than waiting 48 hours for reporting from Google
Which particular ads are making you money
Detailed information about each click including IP address, date/time, page the ad was on, particular ad that was clicked on, original referrer to your site

You can get all of this from third party AdSense tracking software, available online from a number of vendors. You may want to email Google to make sure it’s an approved script; otherwise you risk being removed from the AdSense program.

Once you have the data regarding which ads are working and which aren’t, change your preferences to stop running ads that aren’t paying off and increase the ads that are. There are options to change color palettes of the ads to better fit your site, a variety of ad formats to always keep your website looking fresh and don’t be afraid to rearrange content often.

Google introduced some new features to AdSense account. When I checked its really useful, So I request to all adsense members toCheck below given points to increase your AdSense Revenue. This is equily important for Publishers who will going to join AdSense.If they read this points and put banner accordingly it would increase their Adsense income.

Tips for Maximizing Your Google AdSense Revenue.These easy-to-implement tips to help you maximize your AdSense earnings potential.

1. Show your ads above the fold.Placing ads above the fold (the section of your page that is visible without scrolling) will make the ads more readily visible to your visitors and increase the opportunity for clicks.

2. Try different ad formats.Not all web pages are alike, so try using different ad formats to complement the varying layouts of your web pages. Google have a number of ad formats available for AdSense publishers, Choose one from that which is most suitable to your page.

3. Customize ad color combinations.Try using custom color combinations for your ad units. This allows you to ensure that the text, background, and border colors of your ads complement your website. You can choose from a wide variety of colors to create your own custom color palettes, or select from over 20 pre-defined combinations. When using color palettes, follow below given points.The background color of the ad the same as or similar to the background color of your page.

The border of the ad a color that is prominent on your page.The title of the ad a color that is similar to the text on your page.The URL of the ad a color similar to other link colors on your page.For added variety and freshness, you can even choose to rotate through up to 4 different color palettes at a time.visit http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=9981 for editing your ad colors and creating color palettes.

4. Allow the Google bot to access your site content.To maximize your potential with AdSense, it is important that your site content is accessible to our content crawler. Certain mechanisms on your site may limit the amount of content we can crawl and use to generate ads:

Robots

If you have a robots.txt file, remove the file or add the following two lines to the top of the file:User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*Disallow:This change will allow google bot to crawl the content of your site, so that google may provide you with the most relevant Google ads.

Frames

If your page uses frames, place the AdSense ad code within the frame containing content so that relevant ads can be served. Placing the ad code in an otherwise empty frame, or in a frame containing only graphics or dynamic content, will prevent google from gathering content and serving targeted ads.

Also, when generating ad layout code for pages with frames, be sure to select the Framed page checkbox on the Ad layout code page.

Login/Authentication requirements

Place AdSense ad code on web pages that do not require an account or password for access. Google crawlers aren’t optimized to index pages that require a username and password, and as a result, relevant ads may not be served to these pages.

5. Filter out ads you don’t want displayed on your site.From within the Settings section of your account, AdSense gives you the ability to create a URL filter list. Adding a URL to your filter list will prevent ads from that URL from showing on your website. This is a quick and easy way to prevent competitors’ and other unwanted ads from being served to your pages. Ads for the websites that you add to your filter list will not run on your site, but remember that filtering sites may decrease the number of ads that can appear on your pages as well as decrease your potential earnings.

For detailed instructions on how to create a URL filter list, please click herePlease do not click on an ad to find its URL. This may be registered as fraudulent clicks in our system. learn more about how to find the actual URL, please visit google.com

6. Place AdSense ads on text-rich pages.Add AdSense ad code to pages on your site that predominantly contain text. Only text is used to determine a page’s content. Therefore, although Google’s targeting technology is optimized to target ads to pages with frequently updated content, image-heavy pages or pages with dynamic media such as Macromedia Flash ™ may not return relevant ads.

7. Create pages that are simple and clean.People typically skim a website for less than a minute. Ensure that visitors to your site can find what they are looking for and are not overloaded with clutter. Readability, clear navigation, and speed of loading all contribute to a well designed website.

Make sure that your font colors are easily read on your background color. Use a font size that is easy on the eyes, and use visual clues such as bullets and horizontal lines to make your site easily understood. For additional information, helpful Google search terms include:

website design tips google.com

web design readability google

8. Use channels to track performance.Channels are the perfect way to track the performance of your pages. Before and after optimizing your pages for AdSense, group them into channels to see how your leaderboards are performing versus your towers, or track one domain versus the other. You can even see how individual color choices affect your clickthrough rate. For more information about channels, and instructions on getting started, search or browse google.com for AdSense Support.

For comments, suggestions, and general support questions, please contact google support team at adsense-support@google.com.For technical support, please contact adsense-tech@google.com.

Know More About Google Adlink Units

When Google first launched AdSense, there was some skepticism from publishers. As much as most people were blown away by the idea of ads that were targeted to the content of a Web page there was the question of whether users, used to banners and skyscrapers, would click on something that looked so different.

Boy, were those doubters wrong! AdSense has more than proved its worth to advertisers, users and publishers.

A similar sense of skepticism greeted Google's launch of AdLink units. With nothing more than a list of links (which then lead to the ads), these units contain even less information than a traditional AdSense unit. And the user has to click twice before the publisher gets paid. That makes them sound about as welcoming as a winter barbeque in Siberia.

It took a while for publishers to discover that actually AdLink units weren't as bad as they looked, and that with a smart bit of positioning they could actually take advantage of the way some pages are laid out. In fact, for some designs, they were able to reach parts that other AdSense units just couldn't reach!

And best of all, publishers quickly discovered that once someone clicked on an AdLink unit, they would almost always click on the ad that followed. That did their revenues the world of good and removed the two-click doubt.

The old AdLink units then were effective, but fairly limited. They were great if you knew the one or two places on the page to use them but not so good if you didn't. Recently though, Google has launched horizontal AdLink units that have taken these ads into a whole new realm. Because they fit neatly across a page they're useful for a much broader range of page designs and are much more flexible. On the other hand though, they're now competing for space directly with the traditional ad units, making it even harder for publishers to figure out which ads to place where.

Is all this good news for publishers or bad news?

It's great news for savvy publishers who have more tools to maximize their AdSense revenues (and know what to do with those tools) but it's bad news for people who don't make the effort to learn how use AdSense - and now have more ways to miss out.

The two main ingredients to rank highly in the search engines are that you must have good content and have lots of links pointing to you. For the vast majority of bloggers, writing excellent content is not the problem. The problem is finding the best ways to build links to the blog, as well as building deeplinks to the blog posts themselves.Thousands of self-proclaimed "link building experts" will try to sell you expensive ebooks showing you the greatest places to build your links. The main reason this article was written is to show you that there is no reason to buy your way to a great link building campaign when you can do it all completely free. As a prelude, you should know that the most common free link building strategies such as link exchanges or linkfarms can be hazardous to your sites search engine rankings. As a good way to judge whether or not a link building technique will be dangerous to your site or not is to imagine if that link would be placed there if the search engines didn't exist. If you were not adding your link to a site for the sole purpose that Google would find it, would you still add it?With the prelude out of the way, lets move on. Building links to your blog is a lot different than building links to a static site. According to most people who own blogs, it is hundred of times easier. On your blog, you can build tons of links to hundreds of different pages, which you cannot do on a static site. Blogs are also updated on a daily basis, meaning the search engines crawl through them for hours and rank them higher with very little extra work. Your link building campaigns will be far more reaching than if you were on a static site. Every single post you make on your blog has a chance to gain tons of social media links which will result in higher search engine placement and more traffic. The more traffic, the more money you make!After spending many hours searching the internet for places to build links for blogs, the best place you should focus your blog's link building campaigns are on social media sites. These sites generally have a huge amount of visitors and the content that is promoted ranks heavily on the search engines. You are allowed to submit every blog post you write to every single social media site, thus building many links for every single blog post you write. This will allow you to have many deeplinks which will raise the authority of your blogs main domain. In the end, you will be able to rank higher for your blog posts without doing any extra marketing. Stop paying for bad quality ebooks when with a few minutes every day you can submit your blog posts to social media websites for free and receive far more benefit. If the social media sites like your blog posts, it may even make their front page resulting in thousands more visitors and hundreds more links. The result of this can easily snowball into reaching wide new audiences and rank for longtail keywords that you never thought possible. Give it a try because after all, you have nothing to lose.

Blogging is hugely popular and blogs range in sophistication from humble online diaries to massive corporate promotion machines. For those who intend to make money from their blogs, there are a multitude of methods and techniques available in order to do that. One of the best ways to make money with your blog is by making it attractive to advertisers.

So why are so many bloggers throwing away this opportunity?

Well, the simple answer is they probably aren’t aware of it. So let’s look at the most successful ways of attracting advertisers to your blog so that you can make money from your hard work.

Most bloggers wanting to make money with their blogs start by adding pay per click ads. These will earn you a few cents for every click they generate, but the downside is that once that visitor has clicked the ad, they are taken away from your blog, never to return.

Some of the more enlightened bloggers are turning to more intelligent ways to make money from advertising. More importantly, they are looking at ways of ensuring their visitors stay at their blog.

There are several ways to make money doing that, most notably by using advertising space to promote affiliate products. By coding the link so that the vendor’s site opens in a new window or tab (for those using the Firefox browser), they not only earn considerably more in commission for a sale, but the visitor stays with the blog because the window or tab is still open. This is something that cannot be done with pay per click advertising because the terms of service often forbid the company’s code being tampered with in any way.

But the most lucrative way to make money from your blog is to attract advertisers.

There are several companies already set up that act as go-betweens to put advertisers in contact with blog owners. The usually have set tariffs and pricings to suit a blog’s page rank and Alexa rating, by which they gauge a blog’s traffic potential. This is fine for most blog owners as all the hard work is done for them, they just have to make the space available for either text or banner ads and then sit back and watch the money roll in on a monthly basis.

Fine, except that the middle man takes around half the revenue generated by the advertisement.

While this represents a substantial loss in a blog owner’s potential advertising revenue, it’s not particularly great news for the advertiser either. Some of the bigger companies that have large advertising budgets may see this loss as a mere drop in the ocean. But there are plenty of smaller companies that would like to use blog advertising space to make money for themselves only to find that fifty percent wastage on their budget too much to lose. So they look to other, probably less viable but cheaper methods of spreading the word and the blogger loses out.

There is a solution to this dilemma that suits both the blog owner and the advertiser.

That is for the blog owner who really wants to make money to set up their own advertising page and deal directly with the advertiser. By doing this yourself, you can offer advertising space on your blog direct to smaller companies who can afford the lower cost per month by cutting out the middle-man.

This is easier to do than a lot of blog owners realise. By missing this opportunity it could be costing them a small fortune in lost advertising revenue. Blogs are very easy to customise and one of their great strengths in this department is the ability to add new pages as easily as adding new posts.

So it’s a simple affair to create a new page on your blog and label it “advertise here” or similar.

On that page, you set out the advertising tariff that best suits the popularity and average monthly traffic stats for your blog. That work is done for you if you have already set up an account with one of the ad company go-betweens. They will have suggested a monthly rate for text and banner ad space.

So to keep things simple, you just use their figures. Once this is done, you can then approach advertisers and offer your advertising space for half the price the middle men want to charge them for the exact same space.

Think the advertisers won’t bite your hand off?

You should offer a choice of text ads, banner ads and even one-off reviews of sites or other blogs including a link that will remain in your blog’s archives indefinitely.

So now all you need to do is to attract advertisers to your blog.

How is that done?

Well, the usual traffic promotional methods still apply. Article marketing attracts visitors to a blog or website in great numbers. Amongst those visitors will be owners of sites who may want to place some low cost advertising but don’t know where to go to do it. By simply marketing you blog and mentioning that there is a policy for direct advertising for a reasonable cost, those potential advertisers will then know where to go. They’ll visit your blog and read the “advertise here” page.

If they like your tariff, they will get in touch.

Another solid method of spreading the news is to get busy social networking. This takes the form of registering with some of the top social networking sites and getting yourself and your blog known by the members. This also increases your traffic, making your blog an even more lucrative advertising medium. It won’t be long before certain members will seek out your blog to advertise on.

Don’t forget the established mainstay of site promotion: The forums. Use your forum signature to direct members to your blog and post about the advantages of direct advertising. As long as you’ve established yourself with that forum, you’ll create interest amongst the members which will turn into more potential advertisers.

Whatever methods you use to attract advertisers to your blog, be patient as it may take a while for the first tentative inquiries to find you. Remember, it only takes one very high profile site or company owner to take a shine to your blog and others will follow suit in droves.

By ensuring that these advertisers are kept happy knowing that their advertising budget is being used economically, you’ll start to make money in your sleep from your blog as more and more advertisers find you. It’s one of the nicest win-win situations to be in!

If you want to learn the basic of banner advertising, then you will need to know some terms that usually used to talk about banner advertising. Understand the basic, before you use it.

Banner ad is a graphic ad linked to a website. The ad’s owner is called advertiser. Banner ad sometimes placed on the top of the page, but can also run up the page (”skycrappers”).

Banner view is the number of times a banner is seen. It’s just like the page views, but counts the number of times the banner is downloaded and not the number of times the page is downloaded.

Click throughs, is when users click the image ad and go redirected to the website’s advertisers. Sometimes it called clicks.

Click Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of the number of users who see the ad and how much users click on it. A good banner will have higher CTR.

Conversion Rate is the percentage of people who click on your banner, go to your website and then buy your product. The higher the conversion rate, the better.

Cookies is files placed on user’s computer. It gathered the data about the users and banner ads used them to make sure the user hasn’t seen the banner recently, which banner brought them to the advertiser’s website, and which adverts they’ve seen recently.

Cost Per Mille (CPM) is the amount you pay for every thousand times a banner is displayed, usually banners are charged this way.

Page Impression or Page Views, is the number of times a web page has been requested by the server. Each view is a potential customer looking at a page of your site, but not necessarily a different customer.

Unique Users, are people who downloaded your webpage, counted by IP address. If a site doesn’t check the IP address for each clickthroughs, don’t advertise with them.

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print a copy of this article now, so that you can get the information
off of it as you need it.

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REQUIREMENTS: You must have a confirmed PayPal account. If you do not
have a PayPal account you can go to www.paypal.com and follow the
instructions to set up a free account. In order to place the initial $6
into your account, you will have to confirm your bank account with
PayPal (which may take a few days). PayPal is 100% secure and is used
my millions of people world wide. Confirming a www.paypal.com account
simply means (1) PayPal will first ask you to confirm the email you
used to sign up your PayPal account by sending you an email with a link
for you to click to that email. As soon as you click that link your
email is confirmed. (2) PayPal will then make two small deposits into
your bank account if you set up your PayPal account with a checking or
savings bank account. Or PayPal will make two small deposits to your
credit card if you set up your PayPal account with your credit card.
Then after a few days (it takes up to a few days for these deposits to
appear in your bank account or on your credit card statement) then
after a few days you go back to the www.paypal.com website and sign in.
Then you click where it says this account is not yet confirmed. A
screen will pop up that gives you 2 boxes to fill in. You then enter
the numbers of the 2 small deposit amounts (two separate 2 digit
numbers) that were deposited to your bank account or credit card. Now
you have a working and confirmed PayPal account and can receive
payments.

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[STEP 1]
Send, though PayPal, $1.00 to each email on the below list. Make the
subject of the payment “Email List” and in the comments, write “PLEASE
PUT ME ON YOUR EMAIL LIST.” What you are doing is creating a service by
this - and best of all you are not giving your address to anyone you do
not know. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY LEGAL!! YOU ARE CREATING A SERVICE. Here
are the latest PayPal e-mails on the e-mail lists:

#1) dallaske22@hotmail.com

#2) oceanpic1@hotmail.com

#3) Ray_bijlsma@hotmail.com

#4) stofkey@hotmail.com

#5) Hopje123@hotmail.com

#6) miranda_hihihi@hotmail.com

www.paypal.com

Subject of Payment: ***Email List***

Comments: ***PLEASE PUT ME ON YOUR EMAIL LIST***

Now send all those people an email with the message “Thanks, i have joined.”

[STEP 2]
Now take the #1) email off the list that you see above, move the other
addresses up one (6 becomes 5 & 5 becomes 4, etc) the put YOUR
email address (the one used in your PayPal account) as #6) on the list.
**MAKE SURE THE EMAIL YOU SUPPLY IS EXACTLY AS IT APPEARS IN YOUR
PAYPAL ACCOUNT**

[STEP 3]
Change anything you need to, but try to keep this article as close to
original as possible. Now, post your amended article to at least 200
newsgroups, message boards, etc. (I think there are close to 32,000
groups) All you need is 200, but remember, the more you post, the more
money you make - as well as everyone else on the list! In this
situation your job is to let as many people see this letter as
possible. So they will make you and me reach!!!! You can even start
posting the moment your email is confirmed. Payments will still appear
in your PayPal account even while your bank account is being confirmed.

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DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO POST TO NEWSGROUPS/MESSAGE BOARDS.

[Step 1]
You do not need to re-type this entire letter to do your own posting.
Simply put your CURSOR at the beginning of this letter and drag your
CURSOR to the bottom of this document, and select ‘copy’ from the edit
menu. This will copy the entire letter into your computer’s temporary
memory.

[Step 2]
Open a blank Notepad file and place your cursor at the top of the blank
page. From the ‘Edit’ menu select ‘Paste’. This will paste a copy of
the letter into notepad so that you can add your email to the list.

[Step 3]
Save your new Notepad file as a .txt file. If you want to do your
postings in different sittings, you’ll always have this file to go back
to.

[Step 4]
Use Netscape or Internet Explorer and try searching for various
newsgroups, on-line forums, message boards, bulletin boards, chat
sites, discussions, discussion groups, online communities, etc.
EXAMPLE: go to any search engine like yahoo.com, google.com,
altavista.com, excite.com, then search with subjects like
“millionaire message board” or “money making message board” or
“opportunity message board” or “money making discussions” or
“business bulletin board” or “money making forum” etc. You will
find thousands and thousands of message boards. Click them one by one
then you will find the option to post a new message.

[Step 5]
Visit these message boards and post this article as a new message by
highlighting the text of this letter and selecting ‘Paste’ from the
‘Edit’ menu. Fill in the Subject, this will be the header that everyone
sees as they scroll thru the list of postings in a particular group,
click the post message button. You’re done with your first one!
Congratulations! THAT’S IT!! All you have to do is jump to different
newsgroups and post away. After you get the hang of it, it will take
about 30 seconds for each newsgroup! **REMEMBER, THE MORE NEWSGROUPS
AND/OR MESSAGE BOARDS YOU POST IN, THE MORE MONEY YOU WILL MAKE!! BUT
YOU HAVE TO POST A MINIMUM OF 200** That’s it! You will begin receiving
money within days! **JUST MAKE SURE THE EMAIL YOU SUPPLY IS EXACTLY AS
IT APPEARS ON PAYPAL.**

Have fun!

RSS is a great way to get all kinds of messages to listeners and fans. It has replaced most of the email spam that we suffered through for so many years, and has become a welcomed sight in most people’s email boxes. Here are 9 ways to productive RSS.

1. RSS News
You can use productive RSS to broadcast news about your business or other things that might concern customers.

2. Think Lean, Part 1
You should keep abreast of RSS technology to learn new way to streamline your production. Look for new equipment as well as new software.

3. Think Lean, Part 2
If you really want to streamline your operation, use productive RSS in combination with podcasts and other forms of internet communication.

4. Think Lean, Part 3
Streamline even more by combining feeds and releasing them together. This can help you increase your subscriptions as well as your website hits.

5. Surprise Events
Surprise your subscribers now and then with special events and sales. Use your productive RSS to announce them.

6. RSS as Press Release
In addition to traditional press releases and internet press releases, use your RSS as a press release as well.

7. Blog Links
Put links to your feed in your blog. You can also do this with forum posts, but be sure to check the forum rules first.

8. PPC Ads
Productive RSS can help you support your PPC ads as well as online auctions and other advertising.

9. Updates
You can notify your customers and potential customers as well of anything that might help your business—RSS can bypass most spam filters.

To calculate the PageRank for a page, all of its inbound links are taken into account. These are links from within the site and links from outside the site.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

That's the equation that calculates a page's PageRank. It's the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren't telling us what it is. It doesn't matter though, as this equation is good enough.

In the equation 't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A, 'C' is the number of outbound links that a page has and 'd' is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.

We can think of it in a simpler way:-

a page's PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a "share" of the PageRank of every page that links to it)

"share" = the linking page's PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page.

A page "votes" an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to.

From this, we could conclude that a link from a page with PR4 and 5 outbound links is worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and 100 outbound links. The PageRank of a page that links to yours is important but the number of links on that page is also important. The more links there are on a page, the less PageRank value your page will receive from it.

If the PageRank value differences between PR1, PR2,.....PR10 were equal then that conclusion would hold up, but many people believe that the values between PR1 and PR10 (the maximum) are set on a logarithmic scale, and there is very good reason for believing it. Nobody outside Google knows for sure one way or the other, but the chances are high that the scale is logarithmic, or similar. If so, it means that it takes a lot more additional PageRank for a page to move up to the next PageRank level that it did to move up from the previous PageRank level. The result is that it reverses the previous conclusion, so that a link from a PR8 page that has lots of outbound links is worth more than a link from a PR4 page that has only a few outbound links.

Whichever scale Google uses, we can be sure of one thing. A link from another site increases our site's PageRank. Just remember to avoid links from link farms.

Note that when a page votes its PageRank value to other pages, its own PageRank is not reduced by the value that it is voting. The page doing the voting doesn't give away its PageRank and end up with nothing. It isn't a transfer of PageRank. It is simply a vote according to the page's PageRank value. It's like a shareholders meeting where each shareholder votes according to the number of shares held, but the shares themselves aren't given away. Even so, pages do lose some PageRank indirectly, as we'll see later.

Ok so far? Good. Now we'll look at how the calculations are actually done.

For a page's calculation, its existing PageRank (if it has any) is abandoned completely and a fresh calculation is done where the page relies solely on the PageRank "voted" for it by its current inbound links, which may have changed since the last time the page's PageRank was calculated.

The equation shows clearly how a page's PageRank is arrived at. But what isn't immediately obvious is that it can't work if the calculation is done just once. Suppose we have 2 pages, A and B, which link to each other, and neither have any other links of any kind. This is what happens:-

Step 1: Calculate page A's PageRank from the value of its inbound links
Page A now has a new PageRank value. The calculation used the value of the inbound link from page B. But page B has an inbound link (from page A) and its new PageRank value hasn't been worked out yet, so page A's new PageRank value is based on inaccurate data and can't be accurate.

Step 2: Calculate page B's PageRank from the value of its inbound links
Page B now has a new PageRank value, but it can't be accurate because the calculation used the new PageRank value of the inbound link from page A, which is inaccurate.

It's a Catch 22 situation. We can't work out A's PageRank until we know B's PageRank, and we can't work out B's PageRank until we know A's PageRank.

Now that both pages have newly calculated PageRank values, can't we just run the calculations again to arrive at accurate values? No. We can run the calculations again using the new values and the results will be more accurate, but we will always be using inaccurate values for the calculations, so the results will always be inaccurate.

The problem is overcome by repeating the calculations many times. Each time produces slightly more accurate values. In fact, total accuracy can never be achieved because the calculations are always based on inaccurate values. 40 to 50 iterations are sufficient to reach a point where any further iterations wouldn't produce enough of a change to the values to matter. This is precisiely what Google does at each update, and it's the reason why the updates take so long.

One thing to bear in mind is that the results we get from the calculations are proportions. The figures must then be set against a scale (known only to Google) to arrive at each page's actual PageRank. Even so, we can use the calculations to channel the PageRank within a site around its pages so that certain pages receive a higher proportion of it than others.

NOTE:
You may come across explanations of PageRank where the same equation is stated but the result of each iteration of the calculation is added to the page's existing PageRank. The new value (result + existing PageRank) is then used when sharing PageRank with other pages. These explanations are wrong for the following reasons:-

1. They quote the same, published equation - but then change it

from PR(A) = (1-d) + d(......) to PR(A) = PR(A) + (1-d) + d(......)

It isn't correct, and it isn't necessary.

2. We will be looking at how to organize links so that certain pages end up with a larger proportion of the PageRank than others. Adding to the page's existing PageRank through the iterations produces different proportions than when the equation is used as published. Since the addition is not a part of the published equation, the results are wrong and the proportioning isn't accurate.

According to the published equation, the page being calculated starts from scratch at each iteration. It relies solely on its inbound links. The 'add to the existing PageRank' idea doesn't do that, so its results are necessarily wrong.

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated.
PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

From here on in, we'll occasionally refer to PageRank as "PR".



Notes:
Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it.

This list reviews my preference starting from the best to the least effective monetization methods I have implemented on my blogs. Note the list is entirely representative of my experience and I believe what monetization methods work depends heavily on the topic you blog about and consequently the type of reader you attract. This is why, as you will see, my list differs from Chad’s, although I do agree with him that AdSense is at the bottom of the heap.


The important thing is to test and find out what works best for you. Don’t assume because something is best for someone else’s blog that is the case for all blogs.

1. Recursive Affiliate Income

If you are on my early notification list for Blog Mastermind you already know why I love recursive affiliate income. Affiliate marketing is great because you sell something and you don’t have to deliver any product or provide customer service. With commissions as high as 75% you can run an online business that never produces anything, all on the back of affiliate marketing.

Recursive programs are the best type of affiliate program. When you sell a continuity product - something people pay for on a regular basis to maintain their membership - you are also paid an affiliate commission on a regular basis. If you build up enough recursive affiliate sales you can secure a stable income source.

As an example, I don’t just recommend programs like StomperNet because they are great products backed by real experts (which StomperNet is), but also because they have recursive affiliate programs. When a person signs up under my affiliate ID I make a commission every time they are charged to maintain their membership.

In your case you might have to look around to find relevant continuity products with affiliate programs to promote on your blog, but it’s well worth it.

2. Direct Ad Sales

Chad called this fixed monthly sponsors, which is exactly what I do as well and I agree with him, it’s a fantastic way to monetize a blog. There are no middlemen to take some of your profits and you can maximize the return on investment of your advertising inventory.

I’ve been selling banners off of my websites for eight years and it’s always been a consistent earner. Lately text links have become more popular, but it really doesn’t matter what the format is, it’s all about providing value to sponsors. In my experience I’ve usually had a small handful of sponsors who remain regulars and buy my ad inventory on a repeat basis. They see the value in this advertising medium and I appreciate the regular source of income.

If you don’t have one already, the first step for attracting sponsors is to set up an advertise page. Take a look at my advertise page as a good simple example to follow.

If an advertise page doesn’t translate into sponsors, and this might be the case if your blog is small or new, you will need to be proactive and look for sponsors yourself. I did this many years ago on a hobby site about the card game Magic: The Gathering. To locate sponsors I found all the most prominent online retailers that sold the game and emailed them to see if they would be interested in sponsoring my site. The end result was one advertiser coming on board and sponsoring the site for four straight years and others coming on for many months at a time.

I have always sold ads on a per month basis, but you can do per impression (CPM) or per click or even per lead. I once tried per-click for banners but unless you charge something ridiculous like $1 a click you don’t make much. Banners are simply not good for direct traffic in my experience and are better used as combination branding/exposure tool to associate your company in the minds of the people in a certain industry. That way, when they do come to decide they need something that your company provides, thanks to seeing your banners everywhere, they remember you as a provider of that product/service (in other words - effective branding). But I digress…

3. Text-Link-Ads.com Brokering Service

Text-Link-Ads is a very well known text link broker that connects advertisers with publishers who are paid to place text links on their site. The Text-Link-Ads service acts as the middleman company, taking a cut of the revenue in exchange for sourcing the sponsors for you.

From a blogger’s perspective this is a very low-maintenance monetization method. You install the plug-in, assuming you are a WordPress blogger, add a line of code to your theme template for where you want the text links to appear and then sit back and let Text-Link-Ads do the work. It’s been a proven income source for me now for many months, and while it’s not a massive return, a consistent $500-$700 a month is nice to have.

For smaller bloggers Text-Link-Ads is still an option, just don’t expect to earn a significant return or sell all your ad inventory until you increase your traffic and pagerank.

4. One Time Affiliate Income

Affiliate income takes position number four on my list too but the difference to recursive affiliate income is that this time I’m talking about products that pay out once, each time you make a sale. In this case the money isn’t quite as dependable as recursive programs since you need to keep selling in order to generate revenue, however some products have large payouts and just one sale can make it worth while.

I find there are two types of products that have sold well for me as an affiliate. The once-a-year big events like conferences and workshops, which pay out commissions ranging from $100 - $1000 depending on the cost of a ticket. I don’t usually sell many of these, but with such a high commission just one or two ticket sales can be enough. About two years ago I promoted Perry Marshall’s conference which cost $2000 to get into and he paid a $750 affiliate commission. I only sold two tickets, but that $1500 was more than I had generated in the previous year of blogging.

The other good seller is staple products, things people in my industry eventually buy. Most industries have a seminal book or a service you can’t do without (for example web hosting) and if you review these products and mention them now and then you usually can sell a few on a regular basis. Perry Marshall again makes a good example again, with his $49 Definitive Guide to Google AdWords ebook, a solid repeat seller since if you intend to do AdWords campaigns you must have this book.

No doubt in your industry there are must-have products or services that you can review and recommend as an affiliate, just make sure the margins make it worthwhile. Try the Clickbank catalog if you are stuck for affiliate products to promote or just think back over the last few purchases you made online related to your blog topic and see if there is an affiliate program for them.

5. Paid Reviews

I’ve almost stopped doing paid reviews recently, but I still think the ReviewMe service is a great way to start earning from blogging. In previous months it has been a consistent $300+ income source, but frankly I’m moving away from income sources that require output from me directly to generate. Since you have to write the review to get paid it’s far from the kind of passive or near-passive income sources I prefer, even if it does pay out $125 per review in my case.

6. Google AdSense

Google AdSense has never been a favorite monetization strategy for me. It forces you to focus on increasing pageviews and thus AdSense displays in order to earn more, which is a labor-for-income relationship, which I try and avoid. The payments are very low and unless you blog in certain product categories even high traffic sites earn peanuts.

That being said, AdSense is fantastic on sites that have user-generated content and thus traffic, because you can set it up and let Google handle the optimization. There’s almost always a higher-paying method to monetize, but sometimes the simplicity of AdSense is appealing.

7. Miscellaneous Programs

There are many other options, including ad brokering services like Chitika, BlogAds, AdBrite, AdVolcano and Blogkits. Some of these I briefly tested but did not like their system or my current monetization methods pay more.

Again, these options might be fantastic for your blog but you won’t know until you try. However in almost all cases, if you sell ads directly to sponsors you make more, it just might be harder to manage and initially procure the sponsors, especially for small and new blogs.

As I’ve said many times before, I suggest you not think about monetization for the first few months of blogging, or until you get to at least 100 visitors a day, preferably 500. Once you hit that first milestone, slowly roll out some monetization tests, perhaps starting with an affiliate promotion to your readers in the form of a product review and then work your way through the list above to see what works best in your case.