Referral ads by Adsense 

The other day I noticed in my adsense account that it had been ‘upgraded’ and that I had some new monetisation options.

Apparently its been live since June . I won’t say too much about what the program offers as much of it can be read over at the previous link, that said it might be useful to look at the headlines and make a little comment on each.

So do I like it? Yes on balance I think its pretty cool. I think it might well lead to a whole lot more writing about various products and services in the blogosphere too. Savvy bloggers who write paid reviews that pay once, might decide that it could be more lucrative to write about products for which they could be paid for multiple times.

I also touched on how it made it easier for affiliate marketers to sign up for new programs via a one code paste route, without the need to have to apply to individual programs.  It’s not so much of a big deal, but it can be a little bit of PITA sometimes having to mess about with hanging around waiting to  accepted into programs.  Its for this reason that I love the instantaneous way in which I can select an advertiser and write about them immediately.

The ability to target individual advertisers, is a real boon for the  niche blogger presenting great opportunities for well written content that performs well.  Google’s huge market share in online advertising also means that I’ll have access to a consistent number of new opportunities.

As content matures and ages.. 

A potential downside  is that if you write content that is too specific to the advertiser you are reviewing then overtime, it could become a problem. What happens if the advertiser leaves the program or goes out of business? Any content you wrote would become effectively dead.

Personally, I’ll probably stick with generic  safe bets on my blogs and stick to general related topics.

Related posts:

1. Adsense Arbitrage Google to kill MFA’s
2. How crap content contributes to the search economy
3. Using search engine query strings to optimise your content.

Blogging for profit?

Ok, not everyone wants to monetise their blog – some people equate money and blogging as some kind of dirty word almost. Some people still like to write for the hell of it and couldn’t really give a rats arse for any kind of monetary payback. Their payback is the reward that comes from getting people involved or simply venting their spleen on a topic near and dear to them.

Its not for me to pour scorn on any money hating anti capitalistic mindset, we can all rant and rave about market inequalities and the evils of money until the cows come home, yet nothing changes the reality of life, which is, we all need the stuff and to have a productive life, we tend to get out and find ways of acquiring it. The easier that task the better no? why work for the man, when you don’t have to, or at least not as hard maybe.

Earning yourself a passive income stream

Blogging and monetising that writing is an excellent way of creating passive streams of income. Passive streams of income are like bank accounts with lots of dosh in them. You get interest monthly and you don’t have to do very much for it.

Getting affiliate cheques every month is quite a pleasant feeling, trust me.
Blogging for profit isn’t like traditional methods of selling ones labour. You can actually own the means of production, which is you, yourself and sell yourself as that product. Decide upon how much you charge, how much you are paid, when you take your breaks. IOW, it really has the potential to free you from traditional forms of work. Your traffic and authority levels can truly give you what you need. All you have to do is do the leg work and build something of value.

Blog Optimisation Experimentation and Cultivating your Niche

So, having tentatively established that there isn’t anything really evil about making money from your blog/s I just wanted to share some of the programs Ive used and see if I could get a little feedback from people with regard to their own experiences.

We all know that there are lots of ways of monetising ones blog. I’ve blogged on quite a few programs and have shared some of my experiences and gave opinions too. I’ve dabbled with paid reviews, and have recently added the buy me a beer plugin too, just to see if anyone actually uses the thing. After all it cost me $0.00 and took me 22 seconds to install. If I get one beer bought for me, I’m quids in

It is very much early days for me. Many of my past web monetisation efforts have been in affiliate market sectors outside of the blogosphere. This is kinda cool though really, because Ive learnt a great deal about what it takes to get traffic and getting people to click through to stuff and funneling them along various paths which is absolutely central to any monetisation aim. I’m continually experimenting with the blogs I use and the methods I employ too, you have to, why wouldn’t you even, call it BO (Blog Optimisation) without any stink.

It’s a well known fact that some markets are definitely more lucrative than others. People also tend to guard their niches with their lives, as a saturated niche becomes that much harder to play in and compete with.

Every niche is different. Different people interact in different ways dependant upon what they are after. If you can ID those behaviours and tap them in to what you do and how and why you do it, then that’s a very good start in understanding what they are all about; as obvious as it is to say, it needs to be said nonetheless knowing your readership and giving them what they want is a key component in successfully monetising your blogging efforts. Sure, you can’t be all things to all men, but you can certainly be the populist and appeal to your greatest constituency.

Blog Monetization feedback

I put up a little poll recently and some of my readers have clicked on the ‘other’ option. Perhaps I should have added other options that covered the various sponsored blog type options that exist. Sponsored Reviews , Pay Per Post, ReviewMe then there is the buy-me-a beer thing that seems to have gotten people chin wagging all over the shop, ebay and Amazon, auctionAds, Azoogle and a few more I’ve probably forgotten about already.

I don’t have one to hand, but it would be kind of useful to have a list of all the various programs out there today and hear of peoples experiences with them. None of those check out my affiliate link type posts please, I’ll delete those in a heartbeat, but if you do have some experience of a program that you’ve used and are really happy with or sad with even! Then I’d love to hear all about it.

Maybe a quick Pros and Cons type comment even.

Cheers

Related posts:

1. Monetize your blog or website – Earn money from your passions
2. Blogging and making money – a state the obvious perspective part one
3. Bidvertiser – monetizing a blog?

Communiques of impending doom 

According to Jensense Google are going to be disabling adsense accounts that are being used for MFA type sites.

Numerous AdSense publishers have been receiving emails from Google the past couple of days stating that their use of their AdSense account is an unsuitable business model and that accounts would be disabled as of June 1st, giving publishers about two weeks notice to prepare for the loss of the AdSense accounts

That’s big news, especially if you are one of these people who have gotten kind of comfortable earning what seemed to be a relatively easy buck.

Arbitrage in a nutshell

For those of you who don’t know what it is and how it all worked, the short explanation is that you’d build a site designed to get clicks from users on your adsense ads and earn a buck.

How you obtained the traffic varied. Some people used PPC (pay per click) programs to buy clicks at the lowest possible rate and filtered them through to a site with ads that attracted a higher payback. So if you paid $.05 for a click and got $.06 upwards back then you’d make a profit.

Google being the largest PPC player on the block means that exclusion from their program leaves a smaller pie to play with.

So what who cares, did anyone die?

Is there anything inherently wrong with this practice? Well, Google seem to think so, else why would they take this action. yet, it has to be said that people do similar things in different ways and different markets. Its called Capitalism.

It remains to be seen whether similar programs will take similar actions. They all make vsrious public pronouncements about how they like to protect their advertisers and add value to them and all that old hype, yet the reality is that in the case of Google for example they’ve happily just let the pennies roll on in for some years now without any real meaningful steps to curtail the process.

One can only speculate as to what actually drove this decision. A call to arms to clean up the SERPs perhaps? A cry from advertisers sick of low quality traffic. A general why should an external marketer be allowed to profit from our system using two sides of the same coin even. Who knows.

The bottom line is that the game has changed yet again.

Dealing with it and taking remedial steps

If you are a thin affiliate for example with product feeds and general low quality ‘find it everywhere else’ kind of content with adsense thrown in for good measure, then perhaps you too could find yourself on the receiving end of one of these unwelcoming letters.

Of course it could just be a public purge designed to bolster waning perceptions of ad quality and policing. Advertiser confidence is key to the success of any program. Advertisers using the adsense network don’t want to have low quality shitty visitors to their sites from people who had no alternative other than to click an advert, the view being that this type o traffic simply doesn’t convert. If advertiser confidence in the adsense network is improved then it follows that more will participate. More participants equals more revenue of course.

I can understand this too. On sites I run, Ive opted out of the adsense network from the off, simply because of all the low quality non converting crap I used to receive.

Don’t get me wrong, the adsense network can be great from a brand building and getting your url out there perspective, and it really does depend too on what kind of market sector you operate in. The big arber sharks of this world tend to target the highest paying keywords as these offer the biggest payback for them, perhaps an additional problem has been that as more people have gotten in on the act, this net has increasingly expanded downwards with arbers being forced into going for the smaller paying terms as the larger ones margins were squeezed.

On days like this, I’m glad I’m not an arber

Related posts:

1. Referral Ads by Adsense – Monetising your content with specific targetted advertisers
2. Bidvertiser – monetizing a blog?
3. Monetize your blog or website – Earn money from your passions

Earning money from your website or blog

This piece isn’t aimed at the uber serious long toothed web marketer, its aimed at people new to it all, people who are just seeking new or different perspectives on monetising their websites.
Adsense - Most of us know what it is, some of us do exceptionally well with it too. The stories about people commonly earning in excess of $10,000 dollars a month really are very true. Trust me, I know, Ive been there and worked with single domain sites that pulled in figures above and beyond,in the right niche its very much achievable.

I’m not going to go into the fine specifics of how its done as there are already lots of little tips and sites out there discussing this.

I like Michael’s videos not only because he knows what he’s talking about but because he presents in a non hyped up way. He also has a great balance between showing the potential that someone using AdSense can earn with it but also making it clear that it’s not ‘easy’ money (ie it takes hard work).

Darren Rowse was refering to Michael Cheneys adsense videos , a product I haven’t looked at personally, but as I trust Darren’s judgement I’m happy to go with what he says on it. I’m not going to purchase them though, because well, besides the bighead view of I doubt it would show me that much more than what I already know, I just don’t have the time right now either, Im too busy blogging and doing other day to day work stuff.

Anyhow, an obvious key componant to doing well with adsense is getting a high CTR. High CTR plus lots of good traffic, on high money keywords equates to good levels of income. Even if they are not high money keywords, you can still do relatively well. Some industries don’t do too good, due in the main to the nature of the audience. Take this blog for example, it uses adsense, but its readership is largely one that is tech savvy and adsense blind. These aren’t the types of people who are going to stumble across a page and blithely click on the first ad they see. They are far too sophisticated for that. Henceforth my CTR for this blog is very very low. If I relied on it to pay my bills, I’d be up shit creek without a paddle pretty quickly.

So whats the trick? Is there one even? Sure there is, but its no trick. Its about careful consideration of what you want to achieve and then setting out a plan for fruition.

If you are serious about earning good coin from adsense or blogging/web publishing generally then there are lots of of things you can do. None of them are really short term, all require hard work and effort.

Dont think short term

Let’s deal with why there are no real short term solutions first shall we?

What do I mean by short term?Shut up I hear you saying, I’m gonna buy a big fat keyword list from cash keywords dot com and build a nice little app and rake it all in.Really? You are huh? Trust me, its not that simple anymore. You’ll earn for a while, but sooner or later you will get popped off and get both your adsense account and your domain banned from the search engines. Not worth it. Not anymore at least, well, not IMO – I’m sure I’ll get the odd contrarian to the view, but hey, piss off even, I’m not interested, the days of the * MFA site are numbered. You’ll get a whole lot more satisfaction and reward from doing something that adds value to the world, splogs and MFA’s do not, think karmic.

* Some people go crazy and set up lots of splogs or plugin databases of keywords and sprinkle them into various words and phrases pulled from various rss feeds – These are often refered to as MFA’s or made for adsense sites. These are the sites you find in the serps that annoy you cos they just contain ads to other sites that you would have found anyways had you clicked on the ads at the search engine
p.s There is nothing wrong with cashkeywords.com, in fact it really does have its uses for all manner of things, its a great product.

Write about your passions

We all have our passions. I have a few, good beer, good wine, good women, good food, arsenal,football, boxing, nature, painting, cycling, books, psychology, reading, good films,good parenting, PHP, the internet, seo, nice holidays, nice cars, nice clothes, technology, politics, desire to live somewhere warm and sunny, better place to live, good health, travel, financial security, emotional well being, blah blah are just a few that pop into my head. I could if I chose to, (and for some I do already), write about anyone of those and build up a nice little web portfolio. For example, I blogged on my divorce, it helped me wrestle with all the crap; at the time it helped me deal with a crappy time in my life it was a useful way of expressing stuff that for want of a beter word, messed with my head. I’ve since closed the blog, and put ads on it. I now earn a small residual income from it as a result, nothing huge but a steady passive income nonetheless.

Publishing your content

We can’t all be html geeks or PHP knobheads, some of you’s have a life! Some of you’s wouldn’t have a clue about FTP and meta tags and title tags and page structure and whatnot- well, great because you really don’t have to either. You could get a good wordpress CMS like the one i’m using here and after a little bit of reading and familarisation you’ll soon be on the road to creating that all important content.

“But I’m not an expert, what do I know?” I hear you complaining.

Well, provided you can read a little and write a bit and use a keyboard then it really doesn’t matter. People are interested in people. People want to find out information and perspectives on that information.People duh, learn from each other. What is commonsense to me, might be enlightening for someone else. We can all take and learn a little from each other, it’s what makes the web the marvellous communication medium that it is. In a potential audience of 5 billion people, there’s bound to be someone somewhere who likes what you have to say.

Ok, so you are toying with the idea, but don’t really want to go with the hassle of buying a domain name, setting up some webspace, getting a database up and running, installing a blog only to find that its not really your bag. No problem, why not just experiment then to see how you go with it. I did,as I wasn’t quite sure whether I’d really get into it, so I setup a free wordpress blog, try it yourself just type in yourname.wordpress.com in a browser and see what happens. You won’t (currently) be able to use adsense with it, but it’ll give you some insight, and if you decide its your bag you’ll be able to export your stuff later. If you are stuck on how that works, feel free to come back here and ask, if I have a minute I’ll help you, or blog on it even.

Established publishers/website owners/bloggers

You may already be a blogger, blogging on a free template like blogger, or faceparty or myspace or 43things – um…why? Sure, I hear you on the community front and interaction thing, but hey, you can do all that still and get paid for it too, earn a passive residual income that accrues overtime.

Hosting and domain names are so so cheap these days, for less than $100 a year you could be up and running gabbling away to your hearts content, doing paid blog posts or reviews even. Yes thats right, getting paid to talk about products or ideas or websites that you actually have some knowledge or insight into, paid and valued for your opinions! Opinions that you are already expressing. I’ve encoutered some fantastic communicators on the web, I might just send them this link and get them to think about it too.
On the other hand, you may just have an old website kicking around that is say a hobby or enthusiast site. Its your little place on the web where you hack on about your passion and talk about new stuff and trends. Why not convert it? How long would it really take you to cut it all up or insert an extra bit of code here or there. Or failing that, why not just tag on a blog, leave the old content in place and use the options WP enables to help promote your site amongst the ever increasing wealth of diverse community mediums out there.
Contextual advertising and code placement

There are a number of programs out there that you can use. Adsense is the most popular, then there is adbrite and the YPN progam. Most programs operate a system whereby you are paid when a user clicks an advert on your site. Some also offer a CPM option whereby you are paid based on the number of impressions you accrue. All programs are bound by fairly strict terms and conditions, that protect the participating advertisers.

The adsense help pages carry a wealth of advice and information. Their heatmap graphic is a good pointer as to ad placement. It shows where people are likely to be focused and suggests using that knowledge in determining best placement.
By being creative and imaginative with your code placement you can get that all important clickthrough and earn a little income from what you write about.

There are also some excellent wordpress plug ins that can help with this too.

I like Dax Herrera’s adsense injection plugin as it enables for all sorts of different types of placements and configurations and gives you some cool options like randomised placement, thus reducing the so called adsense blindness effect.

Promoting your content

You don’t want to rely completely on search engine traffic. Algorithms change, websites rise and fall. You can help insulate yourself from this by using the myriad of social media networking tools out there. Yahoo have a useful primer into this here but its a fast paced environment that changes quickly. The key is to keep abreast of the changes and look out for new exciting initiatives as they appear.
If you read this and are someone who isn’t currently blogging or monetising their website and subsequently do and have a positive or negative experience as a result, then I’d love to hear about it. I hope you come back and share your experiences at some point! Think long term, don’t expect to get stinking rich from it, and you’ll enjoy it.

Thanks for stopping by!

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I was just over at tech crunch reading some of the broohah about some deal that fell through regarding performancing and payperpost and was kinda surpised at the level of snorting and derision being applied there. There is this guy named Ted, who like most people trying to get things off of the floor in life has managed to obtain $3 million dollars in funding for an idea, which he feels might just fly. So far he has managed to stir up a bit of controversy, with various high profile people like Matt Cutts coming out against the idea in general.

So ok, I can see why a search engine might have an issue with squillions of bloggers being paid to promote and talk about things using keyword rich anchor text to distort the search landscape but thats just tough I guess, they’ll find a way to deal with it, or mightn’t bother even, hardly the end of the world for mfa sites adsense now is it. Besides what with all this talk about mature algos and whatnot, I doubt it’ll make a huge difference anyways, a storm in a teacup even? Perhaps, or maybe some might see it as the thin end of a wedge. The lines get a little blurred when you think ahead and envisage a SERP full of results containing blogs that have been written on the basis of some monetary consideration. In those scenarios, where would the distinction between paid ads and paid ads masquerading as free serps be drawn? Should the search engine be held accountable for its editorial decisions?

Google or any other search engine for that matter wants their free SERPs to be full of stuff that is diverse and in some cases ‘untainted’ by the dirty grubby mits of commerce. Its probably why we haven’t yet seen paid inclusion rolled out yet, its full of issues pertaining to disclosure and ads. Y! for example once had a program that enabled you to appear in their results, provided you paid - it was soon dropped amid a wail of criticism.
A Washington Post article discussing word-of-mouth-marketing references a petition from Commercial Alert, an advertising and marketing watchdog group based in Portland Oregon and the response from the FTC associate director.

“The petition to us did raise a question about compliance with the FTC act,” said Mary K. Engle, FTC associate director for advertising practices. “We wanted to make clear . . . if you’re being paid, you should disclose that.”

So ok, no harm done then, if you are going to blog and get paid for your posts then you should disclose that somewhere – isn’t that what tinytext and footers are for .

I haven’t looked too intently at either ReviewMe or PayPerPost so have no idea whether or not they enforce disclosure in any toc’s. That said, the FTC is just an American governmental organisation with no jurasdiction or enforcement powers outide of the USA. The web is a big place full of other people from different countries and nome de plumes, and aliases. Gambling is still alive and kicking on the net even after a ban , some things just can’t be legislated away.

When people like Guy Kawasaki talk about how he made a paltry $3k adsense revenue from 2,436,117 page views then its hardly surprising when people not half as financially astute look for better earning opportunities. If you are one of these people who write about stuff daily on a topic close to your heart then goodluck to you if you can earn from it too.

The way I see it is that people will soon see through any posts that extol the virtues of some commercial lot of tosh. Try it yourself – try and get enthused on a daily basis for stuff that you don’t really believe in or want to talk about, see how long it takes people to switch off from what you are saying.

I think thats where reviewme could make a difference. I think they say to the bloggers, “here is so and so a company, they want you to write about them, they’ll pay you too, and you can say what you like as well” wheres the harm?

SE Reps to the back of the room please.

Related posts:

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This could be kinda cool for publishers. Caydel reports that Google is beta testing keyword based ad filtering. Publishers will be able to input negative keywords so that low priced cpm or cpc ads won’t show…

Hmmn, interesting eh? How many times have you seen ads that made you think what’s all that about then, a 0.07 cent ad how cool, not!

I’m hardly a PPC or adsense expert but Ive played with both so can see a few advantages and disadvantages here.

For advertisers, dependant upon take up and use, couldn’t this well push up costs? As publishers exclude low cost kw’s from appearing, then there would as a consequence be less playgrounds to play in. Less exposure = less clicks =  less revenue/higher cost conversions overall…no? It would also have an impact on the adwords/adsense arbitragers out there too. It’ll sure squeeze their capacity to get that ultra low cost traffic.

As far as publishers go, would it be all good? Or could they overstep the mark and exclude too many kw’s, just to be left with PSA’s or alt url ad outputs.

Will be an interesting one to watch!

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