How to Make Money with Google Adsense

OK, there's a lot out there on how to REALLY make Google Adsense work for you. (These are keyword-specific ads that pop up on your web and blog pages, elicit clicks from visitors, and create passive revenue for you.)

I've been interested in this since I heard Michel Fortin and Sylvie Charrier talk about this at the last Big Seminar I went to (2005 LA)… and here's what I've gleaned. (By the way, they do have a free mini course on the fine art of 'contextual advertising', which I'm checking out.) We've just gotten around to playing with Adsense on some of our freebie pages, autoresponders, etc…

Here's what seems to work.

If you're placing Adsense ads on article pages:
1. Do not run a stack of boxed vertical ads down side margins
2. Remove border of ad
3. Work in around content so it intrudes into big vertical box that copy runs in.
4. Your goal is to make it look less like an ad
5. Make all ads horizontal.
6. An ad should always be in the upper left corner
7. A good size is the 336x280 large rectangle
8. If you have to, run your ad across the bottom and/or top of page
9. Or … better … disperse an ad or two in among content
10. No more than two ads per page of content

If you're placing your ad on autoresponders

1. Put autoresponders into html
2. Leave them as text except for Adsense ads
3. Follow above guidelines for size and placement

Tags: AdSense, Google AdSense, contextual ads

Important Update on How & When to Publish Articles On Line

I recently ran this article in my Expert Status newsletter … and I thought it was important enough to run again here. It’s based on a white paper I read by Jason Potash of www.articleannouncer.com, all about how to set up your article publishing to maximize your search engine clout.

While I wouldn’t want to give away all of Jason’s proprietary information here, I found his thinking on how to really maximize your articles useful – and want to share just a few key nuggets here. And add my own two cents.

Looking at the latest research on Google and the other SE’s (Jason feels Yahoo and MSN are rapidly catching up and maybe even surpassing Google’s importance), it appears article publication needs to be handled in a very particular way.

Here’s a new better system

1.Write your article with full, out and out integrity. Don’t try cutting and pasting a bunch of stuff from other sources. Don’t try packing it with keywords so it’s just a keyword-fest. Don’t write schlock. Write good stuff for real people – not robots. Believe it or not, the SE’s can tell now … which is amazing but true.

2.Potash says vary your keyword density within your article. There’s no ‘master formula’ any more for how to stack key phrases in your article. So use all kinds of positions and repetitions for keywords that vary from piece to piece.

3.Themes are important, according to Google – that means their technologies like Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) can pick a fake site packed with keyword-dense ‘content’ from a real site. Potash suggests publishing a series of articles on a theme. Cool idea.

4.In your bio box, put the standard URL back to your site BUT also use a key phrase as an anchor text link – a key phrase that’s got a hyperlink in it – as well. So the article essentially looks like this:

Suzanne Falter-Barns is an expert at helping anyone learn online branding strategies. Pick up her free list of top 50 national media contacts at www.getknownnow.com

5.Once you get this great article in place – with some keywords sprinkled throughout a few times, and possibly used in the header – publish it on your site in an archive or library in its ezine-length version. (My articles all start in my ezines.)

6.Keep this in mind: you can only add graphics to articles on your site – and use that spot to sneak in a few keywords in the title of the graphic, using an alt tag in the html code for the picture.

7.Then – once the article on your site is indexed in the big search engines - add enough material to make it about 25-30% different. (To find out if it’s indexed, just do a search for the title of the article in quotation marks.) Potash suggests adding a summary, or conclusion, modifying keywords. I suggest just adding more content in a place you can expand on, but didn’t in the earlier, short version.

8.Then post THAT longer version in article submission services like www.submityourarticle.com or software like Jason’s. BUT – and this is important – resist the temptation to slam out 8 articles in a week. Space them out to one, or at most, two per week. And build that database of your articles over time. Page rank can’t be won in a matter of weeks, but a matter of months (when it comes to sites and articles. Blogs are different.)

So I hope you find these tips helpful. I’m personally grateful to experts like Jason Potash for doing the research and figuring out how all of this works. His software at www.articleannouncer.com has some excellent power in getting your article out there to a gazillion sites. But almost more valuable is the information he shares with subscribers that really helps them power up his software, and use it correctly. Do check out his stuff. It’s well done.

And do use your articles to slowly, thoughtfully get your name out there. Remember, slow and steady wins the race!

The World Wants Reality These Days – And How to Give it to Them

Roy H. Williams, owner of the good site, www.wizardofads.com , had some really cogent insights recently about what the public is in the mood for these days. Namely, reality. And I couldn’t agree more. After several years of successfully avoiding all TV, I, too, have gotten sucked into the new season of American Idol. And it’s because it’s so … so … real!

And what about this crazy blog craze? Reading people’s honest, off the cuff, spontaneous remarks is also completely addicitve. Because … it’s all about just being yourself – and it really is what people want today.

Do you supposed this is delayed backlash to the 50’s, the 60’s, the 70’s, AND the 80’s which were all era’s that (each in their own way) were full of excess and artificiality?

So this interest in reality fits neatly with something I’ve always said, which is that the more vulnerable and honest you are in your writing, articles, ezine, etc.. the more responsive the public will be.

I learned this when I sold my first essay to a major magazine, SELF, back in 1987. It was the mushiest, most vulnerable thing you’ve ever read… all about how I was waiting for some guy to come rescue me from my single, lonely life in the world’s smallest studio apartment. Amazingly, it generated a huge amount of mail and commentary. People want to be touched. And they GET touched by your honesty.

So if you’re blogging or writing articles, follow Roy’s advice, and keep it so, so real. Say the stuff you’d ordinarily hide because it just doesn’t make you look good. Go for the gusto and tell it like it is.

Example - the titles of my two most popular articles of the past year:

1.How to Protect Your Dream at Dysfunctional Family Get-togethers
2.Highs and Lows of Building an Internet Business

What are you doing to keep it real?

Your Internet Article Could Get Hijacked – Mine Did!

For some time now, I’ve been advising folks to get out there and publish lots of articles on the Net. This has been one of the most powerful self promotion techniques I’ve used, generating more than 37,000 Google links to my name. AND … ya gotta be a little careful with these articles.

Here’s a cautionary tale: Recently, I got an email from a helpful reader, Bob Clarke. Seems he found one of my articles on an article directory (one of the ones we submit to regularly) … only bearing another author’s name instead of mine.

Bob Clarke’s own article showed up on this directory around Christmas Day with another author’s name on it. Then, being a community minded person, Bob looked around and found this errant author’s name all over the place. He contacted ‘Ellen’, keeper of the directory (I’ve changed the owner’s name to protect her identity.)

Here’s Bob’s account:

‘The Directory owner replied immediately. Things started getting darker. We learned that her site had been hijacked. Some creep managed to bust into her code, take a legitimate author name (poor Clare Stevens), and then use it to send out hundreds of spam messages. Apparently he got in on Christmas Day. His code kept running, perverting more and more of the author names. Within 12 hours of me catching the wrong name on some of the articles, it had changed EVERY piece of information to
this spam sending site.

‘Ellen’ shut the whole site down, all 1450 articles. She is choked, and feels assaulted. So, this simply means one less link for Suzanne and I. Ellen, on the other hand, was devastated.”

Wow… sobering, isn’t it? I know we all already have too much to do … but this is serious enough that we need to check in on our articles every so often – at least on the bigger, more trafficked directories. Or delegate that task to a helper, possibly the same person who submits our articles or manages the system that does.

Have you heard of anything similar?