It’s finally happened folks blogger beta is now officially over. Or is it? After the ride my blog has been put through because of this horrible test now they are claiming it’s done? When my feed, my template, and my post editor doesn’t break for paragraphs?
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Remember a while ago I said that I was going to move this blog to it’s own domain? Well plans were changed and I decided instead to create a new blog sorely based on SEO it’s called SEO News Blog and it will be officially launched in a week or two.
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Undoubtedly, you’ve heard about Google’s AdSense and you are thinking about giving it a go. But is it really worth placing an AdSense banner on your site?
The answer is a definite yes. You could always have some other banner on your site, or even use some search of affiliate ad program and that would probably make you some money, given of course that your site enjoys a healthy amount of visitors. However with affiliate marketing, it is expected that the visitor from your website completes a sale before you are remunerated.
But that’s nowhere near what you get for using AdSense. There are people who earn in excess of 100.000 dollars per year by using AdSense. And it doesn’t just stop with making more money. Firstly, the ads are text only. That means they’re by far less obtrusive on your visitors then your average, flashy banner that’s designed to catch the eye of the visitor.
Sure, you’ll have to ensure they get better placement, so as to be noticed but despite that they don’t bother viewer’s as much as traditional ads. Think about the many sites you’ve seen using pop-ups, floating banners and many other schemes that will have visitors screaming in anger every time they visit the said website. You can actually do better then that, annoying people less and still making an amount of money.
Secondly, the ads are generated based on the contents of your site automatically. When you use an affiliate ad program, you have to specify certain categories that your sites belong to.
However, if any page on your site falls outside of these categories, the banners aren’t targeted anymore. And what that means is that you’re potentially showing ads to people who don’t have any interest in them and that can lead to inefficiencies.
With Google AdSense that just about never happens: the ads present on your site will always be in sync with whatever your visitors are interested in and that adds to your site’s value and to the revenue it produces.
What’s more, the look of these banners and their size is customizable, which means they will feel more integrated with the rest of your site’s content, which brings an increase in your site’s overall visual quality as opposed to a traditional approach.
For many people, there’s also a great problem with finding people to advertise on their site as well. AdSense is clearly the easiest solution available to this problem today.
It’s free to join the AdSense program and it almost takes no time at all. The potential database of websites from AdWords is larger then anything you might encounter from any competitor, numbering over 150.000 users. This means as more people compete the CPC or cost per click for search terms will inevitably rise.
Also, setting up AdSense on your site is a breeze, and you can complete the whole process in less then an hour. It takes a lot less to do then any form of affiliate advertising which is yet another reason to choose the easy AdSense approach.
All you need to do is add an AdSense banner on your website (other then registering with the program of course) is to copy & paste a few lines and you’re all done, you get to choose where the banners go, how large they are and how they integrate with the rest of your site.
For any webmaster out there, that’s a killer scheme because it lets you draw the line between your site’s usability level and the amount of advertising you wish to have. Some people need the money badly while others just keep AdSense running to pay for the hosting of their website.
AdSense is a great advertising program because a lot of thought has went into making it “just work for everyone”. It works great for the people who use AdWords, for the webmasters using AdSense, and most importantly for the visitors of the websites.
In a new development Google is featuring little Google Checkout icons on Google Adsense ads in what appears to be a test.
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News of Google adsense beta testing their new Keyword-based Ad Filtering tool has excited many adsense users such as myself mainly because of what this could mean for my revenues.
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How cool would it be if you had an unlimited amount of space on your hardrive? But since the new rap movement all you can find when you look up lists like these, is a bunch of noisy trash that they call music nowadays.
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Google adsense just released a new look and even more features for google adsense. I’ve always complained about how complicated the payment method for google adsense is but with this new page more details appears to be the key:
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Google adsense just announced at the Google Adsense blog that they changed their policies. The new version includes a lot of things different from the last for example images next to ads has been expressly banned. Here’s a review of the changes and differences from the last policy.
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If you look at the Internet a few years back, you’ll see that advertising was done in a way that was very similar to other types of media like television, or actually, more like what you see in a newspaper.
You’d enter a site, and in some location you’d get to see a banner (often these were quite numerous and very large), which would present and ad for whatever company was paying for adds on your space.
But there was one problem with this kind of advertising. It really wasn’t exploiting the fact that the adds weren’t in some newspaper, but were instead presented over the Internet.
You’ve probably noticed a lot of things like this over the pages you’ve browsed. You’re looking at an on-line shop, looking for a watch but you get a banner that advertises a car.
While you might, at some later point want to buy a car, right now you’re looking for a watch and it would have surely been nice if the banner were advertising a watch, because then you would have probably clicked it.
Well that’s also what the folks at Google thought of, so they came up with a killer idea. This is knows as Google AdSense, and it’s known as a targeted advertising program
What you do (as a web designer / website owner) is, instead of jumping through hoops to get some banner on your site that your visitors won’t even care about, is you just allocate some region of the screen.
You then sign up for the Google AdSense program, you insert a small snippet of code in your webpage and Google ensures that in the location you specify, a banner will appear, presenting adds relevant to the contents of your site.
It’s very easy for Google to do this because Google is a search engine company. It looks for the key words in your page, searches a database of websites to find the ones related to whatever is on your page and presto: a targeted ad.
You (the webmaster) get a fee for each visitor that clicks on an adsense banner on your site. Now that’s bound to happen more often then with a traditional banner because people are actually interested in what’s in that banner (otherwise, they wouldn’t be on your page would they?).
But, this also does wonders for the people who want to advertise. And it’s because of the same reason. The greatest thing about Google AdSense is that all the content in a banner is relevant.
This relevancy is the key to the programs success, and also the reason why everyone remains happy. The advertiser has a relevantly placed advert, the publisher earns money from their content and Google take their cut.
Of course, as always, Google has set some high standards for its AdSense program, in terms of looks and functionality. You can’t have more than two such banners on your website and Google only inserts text in these banners.
So an extra benefit is that AdSense advertising is a lot less obtrusive then regular advertising. But this also means you should position the banner better because it’s possible that visitors might miss it altogether.
So in the end, Google AdSense is an advertising program that is unique because the ads are relevant to the content on the site. Anyone that wants to advertise pays Google for it. Anyone who wants to place ads on their site does this through AdSense, getting paid by Google in the process.
All transactions are run through Google, and the advertisers and publishers get access to statistics which help them to understand and moderate the effectiveness of their campaign.
The whole process is elegant, simple and effective from anyone in the chain, from site visitors to advertisers, and it’s one of the reasons Google are known for their innovation and new thinking.
If you’re looking at Google’s AdSense program you’re surely asking yourself how much you could make from such a program, and you probably think you can’t make as much as you can from traditional advertising schemes.
Google, of course, keeps a great deal of secrecy regarding how much AdWords advertisers pay per each click directed to their site and the same applies for how much AdSense banner holders make from their websites.
While there’s nothing official, rumors circulate around the Internet concerning the amount of cash a website can earn by using AdSense. And many people (illegally) disclose how much they have been making with AdSense. There are stories of people raising over one thousand dollars per month using AdSense.
There are also stories of people exceeding $100,000.00 per month but it’s a bit hard to believe such stories. The truth to the matter is that if you have a small website and you just want it to support itself, and don’t wish to reach your pocket for its maintenance costs you can probably do this with AdSense.
AdSense is also very good for people who host a lot of pages. Even if the said pages don’t generate a lot of traffic individually, every click counts and you can earn up with a lot of money by doing this. And that just goes to prove that sometimes quantity matters nearly as much as quality.
There’s no telling how much money you’re going to make by using Google’s AdSense but you can sort of tell for yourself, before actually starting, by taking a few things into consideration.
First, is the amount of visits you get every day. While there’s no way to estimate precisely on this, you can generally make a safe assumption that if you have a lot of clicks per day you’ll be making good money.
Also, this depends on what exactly your site is about. If your site is about anything popular (music, sex, whatever) you’re bound to get a lot of banner clicks. These have a coefficient associated with them, called the CTR (click through ratio).
Basically, what it translates to is that if a large proportion of your site’s visitors click the ads you’ll be making more money. And the best way to do this is to have some popular content in your site, ensuring the links direct users towards popular items as well.
Then of course, there’s the position and number of ads on your website. While you don’t want to overdo it, having many links will undoubtedly generate more income for you as a webmaster. Do not however believe, that if you just add a lot of ads in an important portion of your site, visitors could always just skip them (and be assured that many do just that).
There’s something between an art and a science to positioning your ads. People generally look in certain places and never look in others, and knowing this a website author and/or webmaster can do a great deal of things to increase his earnings with AdSense.
All in all, the amount of money you make with AdSense depends on many factors. But if you have a site with interesting contents and/or many pages, and if you see a constantly large amount of traffic every day, you can bet you’ll be making a lot of money with AdSense.
Even if you aren’t in the above categories, AdSense is still worth using because there’s very little hassle in setting it up, and many times it can help financially support the site, whilst being a nice bonus to get through the post at the end of the month.