Long time no write…. other work has been very busy and I’ve had some health issues as well, bt that’s not what I’m here to type about today.

Earn Money Online Adsense alternatives. I like adsense, in fact by FAR the majority of my online income is coming from adsense these last couple of years. It’s not quite yet enough to replace my offline income, but when I’m able to spend time with it I do hope that my online income can surpass offline work and even make offline work optional.

Anyway, for a long time one of the items on my todo list has been to generate other streams of income that would help supplement adsense and “diversify” my earn money online portfolio. I have from time to time managed to make a referral sale from some of my leftover clickbank promotions that were my first wave of attempts to earn money online. But, the truth is for calendar year 2009 I made just under $80 from clickbank. If for some reason adsense were to go south for me I would lose out on a substantial amount of online income with no good fallback.

So, as luck would have it I was contacted by a company that has an affiliate program through clickbank and had seen referrals from two of my sites to their site. They had some good numbers of how many clients I had sent their way, how much I would have received from adsense for those referrals and how much they could have paid if they were direct referrals. Of course, I pointed out that I would have to think about it. After all they weren’t the only advertisers rotating through those adsense slots. In fact while I may have made a measly $3 and change from THEM for my adsense placement, overall that spot across two sites was north of $150 for a month. It sweetened the pot when they offered me a bonus to give them a try for the month and so I have (and have already made more than $150 total even though just two weeks have gone by. Not counting the bonus we’d still be a bit shy of $150, but I suspect we’ll probably be looking at closer to $275 or $300 by the time a one month trial is done.

So, what is the point of all this. One it’s nice to have a site with decent predictable traffic. I range 200-450 page views a day on each of those sites. Not much, but healthy. They both are in the same fairly targeted niche. In fact, it would take time, but I could create lots more sites just like them in the same niche and probably get traffic from 100-500 pageviews a day when I was able to ge them ranking well. (This particular deal may make it worthwhile to pursue that….)

Really though there are a couple of morals to the story.

1) Plan to diversify
2) Don’t just stick to one method because you like it – look at the bottom line.
3) track everything – domain/page placement/etc. So you know what an ad spot is worth to you.
4) Don’t be afraid to experiment, but make sure you have real numbers (the tracking) to compare with and be patient enough to get a real trial. (2 days is not a real test…. 1 month is.)
5) Adsense can be a good starting point.

This is not the only advertiser I think that keeps track of where their adwords clicks and conversions come from. I suspect, they saw this as a win – win. They knew that they weren’t the only ones in the ad slot and may well double their referrals from my sites by having direct ad placements. (Or possibly more than double?) So, they get more business, I get more for that slot – we both win.

This has also had me taking a hard look at some other sites. Especially those where the ad targeting seems poor. One of the benefits with adsense is contextual ads that relate to what is on the page, but I have a couple of sites that it just seems like a poor fit much of the time. So, I’ve started looking at offers there that might fill/replace that leaderboard placement from adsense. In one particular example the site had a targeted ad front and center, but it was not one that seemed to be a good ad. (I wouldn’t click on it.) So, I replaced it and we’ll see what the clickthrough rate does.

So, test, track and test more. Then look to see how you can duplicate or expand what you’ve started into other areas.

I have used adsense on a lot of wordpress sites and usually I will go through and modify the theme for placement of ads and then sometimes use plugins to ad advertising blocks within the flow of posts and or pages. However there are a lot of well tested and thought and planned themes that are optimised to give a good conversion ratio for adsense clicks. Now, we are not talking about tricking users into clicking, which will not only get you banned, but is an unethical approach anyway. What we are talking about is themes that make certain that the ads are placed in a way that they will be noticed by your site visitors.

One such wordpress theme is called bluesense. I have used this and believe that it has a good chance of giving higher click through rates. I have not tested this side by side against another layout.

My tendency with adsense optimized templates is to think that the simpler site layout, the better. The last thing you really want with an adsense site is a lot of flashy distracting widgets, dancing fish, and flashing signs. This will distract users from 1) the content and 2) the ads.

Over at blogspot for instance, a simple white page layout usually works fairly well with a large block of ads front and center. Google has published heat maps showing adsense publishers the areas of the page that according to their studies people look at the most.

One such theme that has been designed from these heatmaps is the heatmap theme for wordpress and adsense. I haven’t tried this theme out yet, but would like to take a closer look at it.

Most of what I’m focused on is long term establishing of sites so that I have a stream of income that keeps giving. I don’t necessarily chase after the latest greatest news. I did that once upon a time and had some big earnings days from it, but it wore me out. I was writing dozens of posts on a particular site each day, anything that looked like it might have some traction in the “latest news” for the niche that site focused on. I will say again, I did make a fair amount of money off of it, but it was exhausting to keep up with. In fact, I doubt it was worth it at that time because I was blundering around in the dark not knowing which topics would provide some good traffic.

However, these days it is possible to have a pretty good bounce in traffic (and income) by keeping up with what the hottrends are at google. You may take a couple things as examples: Remove Windows Police Pro and Green AV Virus Remove – that first phrase I’ve targeted exactly as it shows up in the hot trends summary. The second one I’ve combined a couple of the hot search trends related to it. It turns out they’re both hot search topics in one of my areas of interest.

In a matter of 12 hours, due to articles on those two topics my primary site has received approximately 3-4x the daily average traffic. Earnings have been fairly good as well. I don’t expect it to last long, because these are basically rogue antivirus applications and it seems as though there is a new name coming around every week in that category, but it’s not a bad way to end a month.

I had forgotten for some time how powerful following hot trends could be until I was reminded by it in a post over at Grizz’s site. He managed over a million visits on several sites over a 15 day period on some celebrity style breaking news. There are a lot of interesting things to take from all of this. Traffic can essentially equate to money if you find the right angle. The early bird catches the worm! Nothing lasts forever…. the longer a term like this is in the hot trends list, the more competition you will see for it. There are a number of ways to try and keep near the top of the stack, but for hot news items google tends to be biased towards new links and fresh content. In other words posting often may help keep you on top of something like this.

Of course, not every hot trend item is going to be open for use this way, you may find the top 10 are too competitive. I managed to pick up the kind of traffic I have though just ranking in the bottom half of the top ten for the two search phrases I targeted. As for staying in the top 10? I’m not really interested in a long term strategy, but am doing what I can to stretch this out for a bit longer if possible.

So, how is something like this monetized? CPA, CPC, Affiliate marketing? Really you could go any number of ways, Adsense (CPC) is a good general possibility as long as your traffic is targeted well to the content your providing. For instance, I saw several people shooting themselves in the foot by stuffing the “windows police pro” words into their header text and the landing page had nothing to do with that piece of software, or antivirus, or frankly anything close. They were getting a ton of traffic, but it’s kind of like sending 1000s of buy one get one free invitations to a bunch of vegetarians for a pork barbecue. You’ll be scratching your head wondering why you didn’t make any money. If you pull a bait and switch like that you’ll have ads targeting whatever your page is about, traffic looking for an answer to a rogue antivirus product, they’ll click and you’ll be smart priced real quick too. Not a good long term approach for your adsense account. When I say that I’m not expecting this trend to last for the long term doesn’t mean I want my adsense smart priced, it just means this specific search will probably not be as high volume next month (although who knows I may still manage to get some search traffic from it.)

Anyway, I complemented the main articles on the topics with some quick work on a couple other sites just to try and widen the net a bit and today, I don’t know I may make a few of those articles rewritten to work their way around to a few other sites and see if it’s possible to squeeze any more out of the trend. I have been fortune that my primary site has enough authority that a new post there can be snapped up pretty quickly by google. I don’t think I could have managed the same effect with a brand new domain thrown up last night to catch the traffic. (At least not as easily.)

So, remember to check the hot trends from time to time. Especially if you feel like you’re spinning your wheels and not making big progress in other areas. if nothing else it can give you a bit of a confidence (and earnings) boost that may help your perspective on your other projects.

So many good things are going on at the moment. I’ve had business that earn money online for quite some time, but I’m announcing a new site that is focused solely on how to earn money online with adsense. I’ve learned so much over the last several years I wanted to share it. I have shared some things here, but it seems to get lost in all the jumble.

So, I’m starting the new site in part to have a small narrow focus for that site and this can remain more general on basic ideas for earning money online. Another reason that I’m starting the new site is that I keep learning new things about adsense and how to approach trying to make money from adsense. Even though I think I’ve done well with adsense up until now, I have had a bit of a paradigm shift in my outlook on some of the ways I’ve been going about it up to now and, well… I think better days are yet to come. So, are the adsense earning reports still going to go here? Yes probably… speaking of which I think I need to update June and July now here – time has gotten away from me lately.

So, if everything goes right you’ll be looking for your very own private island resort in no time!

I’ve made use of the Global Translator Plugin for Wordpress for some time now across several of my sites and among other things I have found that I do get quite a bit of international traffic from it. I also notice that as it builds the translation of your site you will start getting internationalized ads which is good (nothing worse than a page in Spanish or French and English language ads, you KNOW that’s not effective for your earnings.)

I doubt I’m making an awful lot of money off of the other languages because I suspect that English language ads to the US/Canada UK and Australia/New Zealand are probably the best paying ad groups.

That much said, the concept of targeted ads that Google has promoted with Adwords and Adsense says to me that there should be good potential there, so I feel as though I’m leaving “money on the table” as they say by not enabling the global translator. I have learned a few things that I want to pass along as cautionary tales.

The biggest item is this…. did you know that it’s against the Adsense terms of use to show adsense ads on a page that is written in an unsupported language? I’ve read the terms myself it is. (The kind of thing you could get banned for although I haven’t heard anyone claim that was something they were banned for.)

So, here is the list of languages that you want to be certain you do not show ads with…. (I’ve just disabled these translations.) Hindi, Catalan, Filipino, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Albanian, Estonian, Galician, Maltese.

These were not supported by adsense as of my last check in April, but were supported by the Google Translation engine that Global translator can make use of.

I’d also suggest that you set your translations to never time out. That way you can just accumulate a translation of the site. Global translator will invalidate or expire a cached translation if you edit a page anyway, I really don’t see any other good reason to retranslate pages from time to time unless you have rss feeds that are pulled in, or just think they may make a better translation in another few months.

All in all, I have enjoyed having the translations onsite, I have had one message complaining that the translation in Dutch was incomprehensible, but outside of that I’ve not had complaints. I should say that it has altered my writing style when I give it thought. I have seen some of the things that give machine translation problems and if I keep it in mind I will try to write in a clearer, easier to translate manner.

The last item is that I’ve had a few problems with the global translator (mostly breakage in dealing with Google), but usually updating the plugin to the latest release (and setting longer times between each connection to the translation engine) will solve that. Currently Most of my sites will not connect to get a new translation more often than 1800 seconds. (A couple I have set to 3600 seconds.)

–Update– August 21, 2009

Google Adsense has expanded to Latvian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian so I’ve removed those from the list above.

As you probably know, one of the things that I do with my websites is earn money online with Adsense. I’ve spent the last six months or so putting into place some ideas and techniques that I have learned on my own, about three months ago I came across someone who essentially has done the same thing for a couple years and is earning quite well via adsense (with a few additional twists.) Very few people are very upfront about how much they earn with adsense and what their main earning niches are. I’ve somewhat struggled with this myself. Do I tell everything about what and how I do as well as how much I make and where it comes from? Or do, I become mum on the main technique that has made this earn money blog possible? I may explore that dilemma in a post a bit later on, but I thought I’d bring you up to date on where I am vis-a-vis my adsense earnings.

No, I will not tell which sites make the most money. I WILL say that currently this site is not one of them, but I am working my way up in search rankings for some good terms on this site, so who knows if I can keep working at it, this could be one of my big earning sites. I am building links to sites through traditional article, directory and several other methods. Everything is above board. (i.e. no automation of comment spam/etc.)

My real push to start developing traffic at several of my sites started probably around September of last year (2008). I had been making the threshold for an adsense payment every 2-3 months (although at the depths of low traffic it had been maybe 4 months between payments and everything had been in the 100-120 range, but I had some time in September and October to put in some serious work on my pages and on developing inbound links and from then until March my adsense earnings grew every month.

September earnings 55.32
October earnings 94.05
November earnings 161.65
December earnings 216.64
January earnings 308.20
February earnings 335.59
March earnings 423..85
April earnings 306.66 First drop in monthly earnings since at least September.

March earnings surpassed my all time record of around 383 from January of 2006 (just before the big daddy update to Google’s search algorithm which left me scratching my head over what happened for months.)

So, why was April lower? I have a couple ideas. First, the last few days of March (starting around the 28th) I noticed a drop in traffic and earnings. I read some people talk about search upheavals around that time. I also notice there was a public (toolbar) PR export around that time. In looking at the keywords I’m concerned about I didn’t see great changes there, but I did notice a bit less international traffic. Some in the forums claimed that they were seeing less international traffic…. i.e. if the site was a .uk site it was getting fewer US based visitors,etc. It may be that Google has changed weighting somewhat so that more local sites will show up for their search locales. It’s also possible that I had a drop in social traffic around that time. The last round of promotion to social sites my sites saw was early March, so… by late March we’re falling of the first few pages and into obscurity and so I should be seeing lower traffic.

It’s interesting to note that while my traffic in April was about 40% of what it had been in May, my earnings were around 75% of where they were. That means I’m earning more per thousand visitors and in general that means my traffic is better quality. This would back up the “less international traffic” as well as the “less social traffic” theories as those two types of traffic do not convert as well and are more likely to cause smartpricing penalties.

So, while I’m a bit bummed at a decline in earnings for April, I’m convinced that all in all things are in good shape, I’ve weathered the first large google algorithm tweak of this attempt to earn money online with google adsense and I just need to scale up what I’ve started to move from an okay amount to a really good monthly income.

The last theory I have on April traffic is basically seasonality. I suspect web traffic in spring and summer months is less than in October-March, so there may be a seasonal component involved with the drop as well. (That wouldn’t accompany a rise in CPM though, so if it’s a factor I doubt it’s the ONLY factor.)

So, right now I’m in the midst of trying to buckle down and get to work on a handful of sites that I’ve got some big plans for. (Including this one.) One of the things that I have noticed is that by and large the sites that have done best have over 100 posts and the sites that haven’t done as well have fewer than 100 posts. I suspect one of the reasons for that is inlinking improving the search placement. I mean if I have a site that has “red, wooly widgets” linking to the main page from each of 500 post pages I would think that may affect the results for the search “red wooly widgets”. Offsite links typically carry more weight, but links within your own site will likely make a bit of a difference too and when it get’s to a certain “critical mass” you’re going to see some results just from the insite linking.

Anyway, my hopes are to at least maintain in the 300-500 range for the next several months and hopefully push forward for more growth. Unfortunately my other work has been fairly busy and I haven’t had many opportunities to pour time into my sites since probably February. So, if all goes well I’ll be blocking off bits of time to invest on my sites and be able to report continued growth in the adsense earnings from here going forward.

All of this has convinced me that at least for the short term, google adsense is by far the easiest and most straightforward to implement ways to earn money online from a blog or with any other kind of site. This makes two (separate) times that I’ve managed to start sites and work my way up to $300+ of earnings per month with adsense. The first time I had no clue what was going on, how it was working and I poured 14 hour days directly into it at the peak. This time around I’m spending less time, but I think I have a handle on exactly why I’m getting traffic and where I should be looking for more and better sources of traffic.

If you use adsense on your sites, you will know that they now require a Privacy Policy and with their new move to interest based advertising it’s time to update your privacy policy. (grumble…) I know it’s a tedious pain in the neck, but I’ve just updated the privacy policy across about 15 or so sites with the help of a privacy policy generator that looks as though the wording should be sufficient. You get to declare the site name, email contact address and which advertising services you may use and it spits out something nice for you to copy and paste into a privacy policy page.

The autogenerator can be found here. It’s worth keeping the bookmark for it as this is a tremendously useful tool for when you do need to update your privacy policy and don’t want to spend serious time writing it yourself.

If you have a website that sells adspace, or has text ads you’ve probably heard the term “ad blindness”. (If you haven’t heard it you should think about the concept.) The idea is that people regularly seeing ads ultimately become desensitized to them and “tune them out”. In terms of web pages that means they may ignore entire sections of the page, text in certain colors, whatever appears to their experience to be an advertisement. I’ve even known people to miss out on page navigation if it’s on the right hand side of the page because they are just used to ads being over there and don’t pay attention to that area (we may explore that idea a bit more later….)

What kinds of things can be done to fight ad blindness?

One thing you can do is to

place ads in unexpected places. I know we’ve seen newspapers play with this, articles that seem to trail off in mid thought right into an ad, to be continued on another page.

Another approach can be to change the look and feel of the ads. Anyone who has seriously done adsense on their pages has probably heard a thousand times to “test test test”. They give you plenty of opportunities to do tests with different channels for different ad designs, you should take advantage of this.

I found this interesting adsense idea randomizing the color palette in your google adsense ads. This way, your visitors will see different color ads each visit. That would make it harder to ignore the ads.

I remember one of my early sites changing ad colors from a “match the site content” blue to a contrasting red got quick results, but over time they faded, switching back brought similar impressive results at first and then tapered back to lower levels as well.

This forum post asks about the best colors for adsense, but essentially winds up back at the randomization idea that we talked about earlier.

Hopefully this has given you some good ideas for fighting ad blindness, good luck with your efforts.

I know a lot of people talk about how to make money online.  One of the ways to really do it is to use Adsense on your web page.  You might be one of the few that aren’t quite sure what adsense is though so let me start with an introduction to the idea.  Google Adsense are typically text ads that show up in Google search results (usually 1 or 2 just before the first “organic” or unpaid results, or over to the right beside the search results).  Adsense also shows up in pages on Google’s content network “affiliate sites” if you will.  So, let’s say you have a high traffic site about water buffaloes…

You get 1000s of visits a day because you are the worlds leading authority on the subject and you’ve published quite a bit of your work on the site.  One way you can monetize the site is to apply for Google Adsense and then you simply include the code they give you into your pages.  (Be sure to read their terms and agreements to see what the limitations are.)  At the time of this writing the maximum ad blocks per page is three.  Google also has good suggestions on placement of ads which are worth looking at.

What happens next is interesting.  On the first visit to your site, google is notified the page has adsense in it and sends out a spider to scrape the content of the page and see what’s relevant.  It may take a few visits, but eventually you will see relevant ads showing on your page.

One thing you want to make sure you do is follow the terms of the google adsense agreement.  Don’t click your own ads, and don’t ask visitors to click.  These are both violations of terms, but make sure you read to make sure you fully understand the limitations.

At the end of the month, if you have earned $100 or more, google starts the process of payment processing, you should receive payment on or around the 25th of the following month.  (They will do direct deposit.)  If you don’t get to $100 in one month, it will accumulate and you’ll receive payment the month following your greater than $100 balance.