There's been a definite leap in sales in the last four days across my toy and gift sites, so I think it looks like Christmas is here. No real difference in overall traffic, but clickthroughs and conversion rates are both higher - probably between two and three times higher than the previous week.

I really got the sense that Christmas was here when I went to Bentalls last weekend. There was only a token nod to Halloween with a few scary displays, but there was no mistaking that their focus was all about Christmas.

Last year my Toy site lost its decent SERPs just before the Christmas rush, but this year I have a better site, a better domain and I'm hoping to have a very good festive period. I kind of tied my flag to the Toys R Us mast in terms of datafeed and don't want to make any drastic changes now, but it's a shame because their commission is kind of low compared to others - although it has to be said the conversion rate seems good, for me at least.

October generally was a bit flat compared to last couple of months. The changes to MSN's rankings gave me a bigger hit than I first thought and Adsense was down about $600. I also had a mini-disappointment when I saw my Amazon stats today. The overall number was ok, but I had exactly one order short of moving up am additional tier for the month, which is annoying. Actually the order numbers were in excess of the tier, but because not all of them had been despatched I lost out on an extra 0.5% for the month.

That said, October was decent enough and I'm now looking forward to an excellent Christmas period.

Labels: adsense, christmas, earnings, msn, toys, update

I was browsing the Overture Keyword Tool and saw a nice phrase that attracts a good few thousands searches a month.

Did a quick domain search and found a perfect keyword rich domain and knocked up a not too shabby site. I checked my Adsense stats sometime time later and it was already making me money."WTF" was my first reaction.

Did a little bit of digging and turns out the domain has an age of 3 years, and is already linked to and listed on several sites. Some days this job can seem tough. Other days it's so easy it's almost funny!

I just got lucky in that instance, but to do the same thing in a more organised way, you might have a look at Deleted Domains which is a site my friend just recommended to me.

aStore provides aNice Suprise

Amazon's aStore is a nice little tool and I've incorporated it into a few sites, but I must have been a bit slow on the uptake because I've only just realised it can actually rank quite nicely on it's own. I guess because I've integrated it into a few sites using IFRAME I didn't think of it as a site in its own right, but I just noticed they do actually list in the SERPs. And one of mine ranks one for the keyword phrase which is the title of the aStore page. Unfortuntely it's not a phrase many people use so I've reoptimised the page titles with something a bit more search worthy and look forward to seeing where lands when its indexed again.

Labels: adsense, domain names

Adsense in March can be summed up in three words. Best. Month. Ever. Not by a huge amount, but definitely a new high.

So that's great and I am happy, except well over half was from one site and I really want to see my Adsense earnings diversify further because I hate to be reliant on one site.

Affiliate sales were healthy across all networks, and probably also close to being best I've had.

Amazon Associate performance was sluggish in March, with a slight fillip towards the end when someone bought 11 copies of the same book - I can only imagine it was a teacher or professor.

Another welcome boost this month was that some direct advertisers I have on a site decided to renew and in fact lengthen their advertising with my site, which is a little vote of confidence in the site concerned.

So, really an excellent month on all fronts and with the recent decision to work from home which saw my outgoings plummet, things are really motoring.

Will April bring me down to earth with a bump? Or see even greater success?
I'm looking forward to finding out!

Labels: adsense, affiliate marketing, earnings

The EU has a history of coming out with mad policies, such as banning curved bananas, but it may be on the cusp of an announcement that is not just mad, but dangerous to web publishers.

An intriguing email has been received here at Monetise This concerning an imminent policy directive from the EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding.

It has been suggested to me by a staffer within the Commission that an announcement will come this week - probably before Thursday - which will rule Adsense out of order and incompatible with existing EU directives on website accessibility.

A working group put together by the Commissioner are thought to have studied the usability impact of the Javascript based Adsense - invisible to most text based screen readers - and determined that differently abled web users are at a "significant disadvantage" by missing out on the products and services which are integrated "as content" into publisher sites.

My source who has seen the report says it cites the case of a partially sighted man in Austria who has not had a girlfriend in 17 months. The report's authors have been able to prove that the man would have been able to get a girlfriend had he been able to access several "e-books" on the subject that were made available to web users who could view Adsense adverts.

If it happens, this shock ruling will surely have massive ramifications for web publishers in Europe.

**Edit: That was my attempt at an April Fools by the way!!**

Labels: adsense, web accessibility

I get the very occasional email from people who have seen my blog or some of my sites who want to give up their day job and work full time on internet based programs, asking if I can offer any advice. I certainly don't put myself up as expert on these things - I'm learning all the time from others - so am not that comfortable offering advice but there's one thing I think I learned along the way which I may as well share, for what it's worth.

"Keep raising the bar"

I remember way back when I started out and had a couple of sites, mostly just running Adsense. It seemed like a miracle to me that I could earn actual money from companies like Google. Before I knew it, I was earning $20 on a good day from a few sites. And this is where I made a mistake. I spent a long time - many months in fact - having that target figure of $20 in my mind and all I was interested in was hitting that $20 again. If I kept reaching $20 or thereabouts I was happy.

Looking back, I wish I had said to myself after just a few days - "$20 is great but now lets aim for $40". In short, I should have continued to raise the bar and increase my expectations and not settle on what was a very modest figure.

I've found that having the mindset and expectation for greater things has helped me make them happen. By all means acknowledge and congratulate yourself on benchmark figures on your journey, but don't rest on your laurels and keep pushing for more.

Labels: adsense, advice

Google Adsense Referrals has been a massive hit for me and probably the single most successful piece of online marketing I've done in terms of revenue.

So I'm very excited by this announcement from Google on the Inside Adsense blog that they are now accepting applications for a new referrals beta which will have a much bigger pool of products and services available to refer, drawing on their base of Adwords advertisers.

More from the annoucement:

This is good news for those of you who have wanted to use referrals in the past, but couldn't find a product to match your site's content. With the referrals beta, you can search for products that match up directly with your site's content. And you can customize your referral units to match the look and feel of your site, making it easier than ever to find a referral ad that fits in seamlessly with your site's design and content.

At the moment you can refer Firefox, Google Pack, Picasa, Adwords and Adsense through Google referrals. The chance to open this up to a wider and even more interesting selection is great. The brilliant thing about referrals is you can actively promote and advocate the products to your users and encourage them to click and download, which is obviously well suited to affiliate marketers for whom writing compelling presell and copy which leads visitors in a certain direction has always been part of the job.

I've just applied to join the beta and hope to get in on it, although it's open to a limited few at the moment with everyone being able to join later so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm in the "everyone-later" group.

One observation about the beta sign up - it looks like it was thrown up in a hurry. There's a typo on the page and it's not even integrated into Adsense - you have to manually go and retrieve a publisher ID in order to complete the sign-up.

[Edit]

I think in this post I think I probably thought too much about this as simply an extension of Adsense Referrals and not enough about how Google's move into further into the CPA space might have a wider effect on affiliate marketing. Check out these posts from other blogs for more useful perpectives on this:

http://www.here.org.uk/2007/03/google-launch-pay-per-action-today.html
http://blog.affiliatetip.com/archives/google-affiliate-program-20/
http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliateprograms.com/2007/03/20/google-cpa-launches/

Labels: adsense, google, referrals

I am now very fond of the Adsense Notifer add on for Firefox, which was recommended to my by Keith Bond.

The latest Adsense earnings figure sits in the bottom right hand corner of my Firefox window, almost directly above my system clock.

I was treated to a rare sighting of what I call the Adsense Eclipse today when chronology and monetisation formed a perfect union, with the system time and Adsense earnings falling directly into line with each other.

I've had this a couple of times now, but usually it's near misses. My optimal viewing time for the Adsense Eclipse is between 11:00 and 12:00. Any later than that and I don't want to see it occur at all.

Labels: adsense, google

I blogged a few months ago about a website I had called Problem Exchange that was built with worthy intentions and was doing kind of okay traffic wise, but just seemed impossible to monetise. I tried AdSense, Amazon links and affiliate network links but nothing was working.

The site had been using a three column design, with most of my advertising attempts placed in a 120 pixel width column on the right-hand side.

I recently changed the layout to a two column design with a large right-hand column. I've brought the AdSense unit into the main content area and placed it alongside an entry form. Rather than the 120x600 unit I was using, I've go a 300x250 banner. Since making that change, the website has provided a regular stream of AdSense clicks and has become one of my most reliable and consistent earners.

You can see from the picture below where I've placed the AdSense unit. Please excuse the Valentine's Day decorations-my users a demanding bunch and always liked their seasonal decorations on the site.



One of the exciting things about this kind of affiliate marketing in general is in seeing how minor tweaks to the layout and presentation of information can have a direct effect on human behaviour.

Labels: adsense, google

I mentioned a few days ago that I wanted to revisit some of my older websites and improve Adsense performance rather than just see the headline figure for all the sites and be satisfied with that and not delve too deeply in. Of course I've always checked how Adsense Channels were performing but as long as the total was OK, I was generally happy.

But to help with my new approach, I have been making a habit of printing out a "Custom Report" from Adsense advance reporting that shows me Yesterday's Adsense status for all channels, grouped by Channel. I'm someone that reads stats best from a printed page, so I save the report as a CSV and print it out. So far so good, and then I noticed that using the Report Manager, you can have the custom report emailed to you on a daily basis. This couldn't get any better I thought, so I set it up and received my first email report today from Google.

I was happy with that except for one thing - they sent the report as a .zip file. This means that to access the info how I like it, I need to save the attachment, open the Zip file, file the CSV file within, and then print it. It's OK, but it's click intensive. There must be a better way, I thought...

Step forward EZDetach...

I googled around and found EZDetach from a company called TechHit. This dreamy little add in for Microsoft Outlook automatically detaches attachments from email messages. It works as a toolbar button, or more importantly, as a custom action, meaning you can set it up to work as a rule applied to incoming messages. But it doesn't stop there - after it detaches the file, it gives you the option to unzip the file and then another option to execute a script of your own - from where you can then print the file automatically too.

The end result is that I receive the email from Google, the attachment is automatically saved, unzipped and printed. The report comes shooting out of my printer with no interaction or work from me at all. I just pick it up and start analysing.

This solution is so sweet, I thought others might be interested, so here's exactly how I've set it up:

1) Install EZDetach (http://www.techhit.com/ezdetach/) - Free trial is available, and the actual price is only $29.97

2) Open Outlook - I'm using Outlook 2003

3) Find an existing Adsense Report received, and right click on it, then select "Create Rule"

4) Select "Subject Contains - Adsense Report Request..."

5) Click Advanced Options, and then click Next to proceed to the "What do you want to do with the message?" screen. Scroll down and tick "perform a custom action"

6) Click the underlined words "a custom action" to choose the action, and then select EZDetach in the drop down list. Click Change to configure it...

7) Set an Output path, tick Execute and enter "c:\printfile.vbs" and also click Unzip File. So you have told it where to save the file, that it needs unzip to the file and that it needs to run a script called printfile.vbs which is on the c:\ - now we need to make that script! Just click Ok, and Finish first.



8) Open Notepad.exe and enter this text, than click File->Save as-> enter "c:\printfile.vbs" for the file name and be sure to select "All Files" for Save as Type.

Option Explicit
Dim objShellApp
Dim strFilename
strFilename = "c:\my documents\mailattachments\Adsense-Report.csv"
Set objShellApp = WScript.CreateObject("Shell.Application")
objShellApp.ShellExecute strFilename, "", "", "print", 0
Wscript.Sleep(5000)
Set objShellApp = Nothing

I should add - the company behind EZDetach is so cool that they made a print file script available on their website which I hacked about to make this. this script relies on there being the same output path as I had, but you can easily change accordingly.

9. That's it! Next time you get a report from Adsense, it will just print straight out ready to be collected from the paper tray.

Of course, not everyone will want to receive and consume their stats like this, but for the way I like to do it, this method works so well.

Labels: adsense, affiliate tools, review

I'll just concentrate on Adsense for this earnings update, as that remains my biggest earner by quite some way.

In this type of update post, I debate with myself whether to just state the actual numbers but I think you reach a certain point when you're doing kind of well when it seems a bit inappropriate to say how much exactly you've made. Although there's another stage where your earnings are so phenomenal you just have to tell the world - but I'm not quite there yet!

Anyways, so here's a percentage break down of how I did in January compared to the previous month, and the same month a year ago.

	Compared to Last Month	Compared to 12 Months Ago
Adsense for Content	+47.87%	-10.98%
Adsense for Search	+98.12%	+268.50%
Adsense for Referrals	+1.37%	+89.66%
Totals	+20.38%	+21.72%

I find doing this update really useful because it reminds me that actually I was doing better with Adsense for Content a year ago, but because Referral units took up the slack and pushed my earnings forward, I lost sight of other sites which have had an earnings decrease.

When you make quite a few sites, its easy to lose interest in older sites which once earned OK money. So my task for February is to spend sometime everyday revisiting some of the sites that are earning less than they were to see if they can be dusted down and made useful again.

Labels: adsense, earnings, google

Wow, what was happening yesterday? Traffic to nearly all my sites down, click rates were down and the clicks that did come in made only a bit more than diddly squat. It was actually the worst day on Adsense I can ever remember.

January still on course to be a very good month despite that blip, but what a seriously depressing day yesterday was for Adsense.

Labels: adsense, google

It's been well commented upon in the blogosphere that Google has revised its Adsense program policies.

I was just reading through them and one thing jumped off at the page on me.

Publishers participating in the AdSense program:

• May not direct user attention to the ads via arrows or other graphical gimmicks

I think it would be fair to say that my recent experiment including a "post it note" style image as a background could be construed as a graphical gimmick to attract user attention.... so not only did the post it ads not manage to muster any improvements, they may well earn a ban from Adsense. Conclusion: don't do it.

Labels: adsense, google

I blogged last week about how I was trying out a new tactic: putting Adsense ads on a post it note style background. I was running the ads across a couple of sites, and after being live for very close to a week, I thought I'd review how they performed.

The results are, unfortunately, disappointing dull. The ads didn't deliver any particularly noteworthy percentage increase at all. Looking at the specific channel data and comparing days from last week with the same days during the week before, some days CTRs were up slightly, some days down slightly, some days about the same. Certainly there was no consistent and clear increase.

I'll keep running them for a bit because I think they happen to look nice on the page, but they didn't deliver the kind of results I had hoped for.

Labels: adsense, experiment, google

I saw a post the other day (sorry, can't remember where) asking how often people checked their Adsense stats, and it's a question I've seen before on various forums.

I'm unashamed to say, I check them continuously. It's probably the first thing I do when get to the PC in the morning, and the last thing I do when I quit for the day. And in between those two points, I check them often. Like more than several times an hour.

Sometimes I'll be on the Adsense stats page and I'll instinctively click it again in my bookmarks, despite the fact I'm already looking at it.

Sometimes if I suspect the stats are lagging even a bit, I'll sign in from a different browser. Or sign in from a different PC. Or I'll do a custom report and switch from Today to This Month or vica versa in the belief that it's holding back on me and not showing me everything it knows (it works, too!).

I suppose this Adsense addiction could be construed as a waste of time and I could be creating content. But seeing the money coming in is the spur I need to go make some more content.

Also I have various benchmarks that I look for throughout the day. I know what I expect to have earnt through Adsense at pretty much every hour of the working day, so I like to check up and make sure I'm on target and where I expect to be for that time of day. If things are going well by noon, I might have a particularly extravagant sandwich when I get lunch.

And whilst I do use various traffic instruments, like AWstats, Google Analytics or even just plain IIS log reading, Adsense still serves as a pretty useful ad hoc page impression counter so it gives me a nice general overview of how my sites are performing traffic wise which is useful to keep an eye on.

All that talking about checking my Adsense stats has made me want to, well, check my Adsense stats!

Labels: adsense, google

Google is always saying to play with the position and colours of your adverts to see if you can improve click through rates. I've seen a couple of sites which have used background images to create effects around Adsense images to really draw the readers attention to them.

I thought I would give it a go and a created an image looking vaguely like a post it note. I've made that the background image for a DIV and put the Adsense code on to create a rather nice looking effect. See from the picture on the right how it looks different from a plain Adsense unit I used previously. I double checked Google's recently policiy clarification about Adsense and images and think this is all quite safe. I'll report back on if it proves successful.

Labels: adsense, experiment, google

I mentioned the other day that Google had released details of its search data from the last years to show what the most popular search terms.

I have Adsense for Search on a couple of sites and thought I would just take a quick look at the most popular searches across my sites since Jan 1st 2006:

• mcfly
• alg.exe
• svchost.exe
• mdm.exe
• frank lampard

And here's a quick snapshop of the last week - you might notice it's now more biased towards my problem exchange site.

• trowbridge hotspots
• stgsent
• erection problems
• free sexless marriage
• big boob,s agency

Labels: adsense, google, search

With the end of 2006 approaching, it seems like the right time to reflect on what's been achieved in the last year.

Probably the single most successful online enterprise me in the last year was thanks to the browser, Firefox.

It just over a year ago - November 30th to be exact - that I was winding down for the evening and and suddenly had an idea for a website about Mozilla Firefox. It's no exageration to say that I had a domain registered and a small site ready to go within an hour or so. It's also no exageration to say that I've hardly had to do any work on the site since then - maybe another hour or so, here and there.

My intention was to pick up search engine traffic for a particular term including the word firefox. What I hadn't realised was that I was able to rank very highly on one search engine for the term "firefox" itself, which meant more traffic than I had anticipated.

Since that night last November, almost 10,000 people have downloaded Firefox through my site. When monetising sites works as brilliantly and simpy as that, this seems like the perfect job and if only every idea worked out as well, I'd probably be spending this Christmas on the beach somewhere.

Labels: adsense, firefox, progress

Adsense has been great this month, and is up there in my top 3 months ever which I'm kind of pleased about because my sites are no longer Adwords supported, so my traffic was all free. Since I started out doing this, I've waiting for a point where I could say I was earning at least as much as I was when I had a full time job, but through monetizing web content. I'm not quite at that stage yet, unfortunately.

But, I looked at solely my Adsense earnings across a year and thought I'd find out what full time jobs they were equal too. I thought I'd look at job ads in the US and determine what kind of job I'd have to do in order to make the same amount that my websites are doing in Adsense.

Assistant Front Office Manager (CA/San Francisco)
Ensure efficient guest registration, check out and telephone service. Observe front desk agents and ensure that established procedures are completed in accordance with policy and procedure i.e. proper public relations techniques are utilized, guests are handled both courteously and professionally, proper identification and credit are established for all transations. Observe front desk and telephone attendants and ensure that their duties are completed in accordance with established policy and procedures. .....

Computer Tech - Some Exp Required - Entry Level Accepted (Long Island, New York)
Looking for a computer technician. Must have some Experiance and/or Computer School. This is an Entry Level Position. You must have a car to travel to our customers to service their systems. Full Time Position. Benifits. Car Expense Reimbusement.

OFFICE ASSISTANT (Long Island, New York)
A Commercial Cleaning firm located in Huntington, Long Island seeks an Office Assistant. Must be detailed oriented and juggle various tasks.

- Answering an active phone system
- Typing letters and memos on Ms Word
- Data Entry
- Filing, faxing and copying

Labels: adsense

Let me preface this post by saying I think Google Adsense is an excellent service. It was my first foray into making money online and it's been a great, reliable income stream ever since. I recommend it as a tool to anyone thinking of monetising web content.

I was thinking the other day about how I could promote the new Google Pack which I mentioned in a previous post and had an idea for a domain name, and a sub domain name which together would make a very SEO friendly website name.

I was pretty sure that having a Google trademark in a domain name would be a serious no-no, but wasn't sure about the possibility of using it in a sub domain name or sub folder name so contacted Adsense support for guidance. I've heard stories about accounts being closed so like to get guidance from them if I'm at all unsure about anything.

I was a little shocked to get a reply saying that actually using any Google Trademark in any part of the URL was against the rules for publishers. This is actually a massive limitation on what publishers can do, and it only takes a few seconds of searching to find plenty of sites, often well known ones, which are in breach of this.

Say you wanted to review Google Picasa on your website. It's a great product and you might end your review with an Adsense referral unit for Picasa or an advert unit. So far so good. And you might want to call your new page, "review-of-google-picasa.htm". Wrong! Because any part of the URL that features Google branding is against the rules for publishers.

What about if you were writing a blog and had Adsense on your page. If you mention any Google product in your blog post title, the blog software will mostly likely use the post title to generate a search engine friendly URL. Google's own blog software, Blogger.com, does exactly this. So if you mention a Google trademark in the title of a post, Google's own system design will be putting you in breach of their Adsense rules.

This seems like a very restrictive clause in their programme policies, and to be honest I can't see how they could enforce it without losing swathes of publishers, but I thought I would try to bring this to the attention of anyone wanting to ensure they stay on the right side of Google's rules.

The real solution though is for Google to think again about this policy which doesn't seem fair on publishers and content creators

Labels: adsense, google

Google has added the Google Pack to its Adsense Referral Units for publishers worldwide. It's been a part of Adsense for a while, but wasn't available in the UK until recently.

What's in the pack?

• Google Earth
• Google Desktop
• Google Toolbar
• Mozilla Firefox
• Picasa
• Norton Anti Virus Special Edition
• Ad-Aware
• Adobe Reader 7

The payout for a successful referral is up to $2.00

With the Firefox referrals, the referral only counts if it is a new install. I'm not sure if the Google pack includes a similar caveat though I think that would perhaps be a little unfair as there's a reasonable chance a user might already have one or more of these utilities. Seems a decent set of tools to get going on a new PC though.

Labels: adsense, google

Google has announced the roll out of Adsense Referral Text Links to all the other langauges it supports - it had only been available in US English up to this point.

Adsense Referrals are now my favourite part of Adsense, and I hope they are going to further develop it and find other partner products to include. And having the text links available is excellent news because you can easily include them in a hyperlink embedded in a sentence.

The image links were OK but for me there was always a question mark as to whether you could say to a user "click on the picture to download" because Adsense terms had always made clear you weren't able to incite a user to click on Adsense - mainly because each click was a revenue generator. You don't need to worry about that with a text link because you just embed it in a sentence like: Start your free download of google referral link.

Labels: adsense, google

I haven't really talked much on this blog yet about Adsense from Google, but this really is an essential tool for a webmaster, and one which has been very successul for me over the past 18months.

For anyone that doesn't know, you sign up, and then can generate a piece of Javascript code that you plonk into your HTML. When the page is loaded, Google Mediabots will crawl your website to work out what adverts to serve up for you.

The things you need to think about when placing Google Adsense are the colour, size and position. But rather than go into that, I would point you toward the Google Adsense Webinar which has some really great info on how to maximise your earnings from Adsense.

Labels: adsense, google